


hand to mouth

by ruruka



Category: Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Other, drugs/alcohol/sex mentioned in recreation, romantic friendship.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-17
Updated: 2019-06-17
Packaged: 2020-05-13 07:45:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 35,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19246849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ruruka/pseuds/ruruka
Summary: malik ishtar wants to see the world.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this is something i started to write when i was 16, deleted all of, then remembered the concept for now at age 18 and rewrote in like a week.   
> malik and anzu are both very dear to my heart. hope you love it.

_Be home before dark,_ is the last thing his sister told him, watching her through the thick lens of his helmet, and still to the day now he’s certain to never step foot beneath the sunset, and to think of her each time a birthday passes.

Being sixteen years old and horrendously rebellious had been one thing, one thing he’d gotten past with subtle shame weaving through the memory. Being eighteen, and staying smart on the books and less often the streets, keeping his temper balanced and tracks untouched by sin, had been another, though it’d come to a peak tip of tepidity, and he’s twenty now and still wonders why the American roadways must intersect every hundred feet. Not that he can afford the petroleum to truly need to worry over it. But he digresses. Walks are quite nice.

Walks are especially nice with such a view to pause for. The suited businessmen that jostle him on their ways past may pin him a voyeur, though he’d pieced together enough English to call himself a _tourist_ on enough occasions to know his way out of any confrontation. Not that it’s ever arisen- he’s certain the good city folk would trip for the chance to have no destination clamping their wristwatches, to be able to stand before the wide plate glass windows and watch the swans glide upon their lake. Beauty tends to enrapture him to silence these days. Such practice in the way they fan their feathers, those darling swans, though he must be so civil as to name them women as they are, skin tight black leotards promoting the hourglass curves they hug, and all in untouchable synchronization do they lift their legs and arms and eyes, perfected.

He supposes a dance studio wouldn’t have plate glass windows on a city street if he weren’t welcome to watch, so watch he does, mesmerized, numbed by every pantomime.  

Just a few days ago, he’d been walking this way, because he’d had a meeting to get to, and he’d taken quite the dirty lashing once he’d shown up nine minutes late. He hadn’t mentioned that the storm of girls had been strict in their grand jetéing for just exactly seven of those. He hadn’t mentioned anything, not to the meeting or the girls or to the ice machine in the hotel lobby as he set to fill a plastic bag for his swollen eyelid on the return back.

Beyond the window, the twenty or so of them all bend in perfect tandem, brushing fingertips to the toes, and when they rise, there is not a hair out of place. His reflection marvels between them. A pause is taken for what must be breath, and again all the ladies fold at their zero inch middles, spines on display as hands balance with ease on pointed lace slippers. It lives as the most elegant lapse of quiet he’s ever stood through. Then, it dies, cut madly through the throat when through the window he’s able to discern the single sick wave in the whole ocean.

The other girls notice it in time to him, too, and the instructor at the front, because as his eyes strain upon the girl three or so rows in, all the others’ do as well; he wonders if there’d been a loud enough clatter when the necklace had slipped off to alert so many stares, but he can’t be certain. He does know, though, that the necklace in question rests to the hardwood floor for just hardly a second before hands scramble to snatch it back up. She stands, fervor clear in her idly pink face, clutching the pendant to her chest and nodding her head in quick apology to pray the class continue on.

And it does.

But he cannot.

He cannot, for as soon as the necklace had slipped its way from her throat and onto the floor, he’d wondered why such a young woman would flaunt such glinting gold in the midst of a filthy city, and as soon as she’d picked it back up, his focus had trailed from the pendant to the hand clutching it, its flawless cream manicure, its delicate wrist and arm of slender pale, walking all the way to that flush of mortification he’d watched take residence on her cheekbones. Her face, _her_ eyes and _her_ thin pink smile, the tuck of hair back into a scrunchie tie, the generous balance of chest in comparison to the body he doesn’t remember being quite so slim. And that’s just it- he doesn’t remember her ribs sticking out so much, or her teeth being that white and perhaps she’s grown an inch or so in the past...good God, what now, four years? Yes, he’s perfectly shock slate sallow, watching through the window on the busy morning New York City street, and he knows not the odds of picking out someone he _knows_ like that among a population of thousands, but she’s there. _Her._

Vaguely, as his stare burns millennia through the window glass, he wonders if she feels it; she must, she _must_ feel him standing there gawking over her every inch, because when she looks at him just the same, _he feels it,_  tight flush to every muscle. He feels the way Mazaki Anzu glances at him through the window, and he feels her eyes widen an inch in their diameter, and he feels her panic for the second time consecutive to be called attention upon for falling out of sync with the rest.

Her focus flips momentarily to the instructor’s muffled bark ahead, and she nods, and she lifts her leg back to match the rest. He cannot help but wonder, wonder, wonder, if she ever looks back at him again, only to find him vanished from sight, and he wonders if she can decide whether or not he’d been an orange sunrise of her imagination only.

On his swift tramps forward, he wonders the very same about her.


	2. Chapter 2

Malik does not think about Anzu on his walk back home. He does not think of her as he takes the elevator up to the thirteenth floor, or when he swipes the key card to room 13C and finds his clothing strewn across the bed and carpeting the same as he’d left it- it’d been an odyssey selecting an outfit before daylight had even hit, and he’s only slightly sour now to know his destination had never even been met, so the time’s been a waste. At least he looks drop dead in the tight denim and black graphic tee, he thinks as he throws himself in desperation across a side chair- because he _isn’t_ thinking about Anzu, so he has time to think about himself, and his clothing, and the mess in his hotel room and how badly he aches to rush back and see her again already.

He misses Ishizu, that’s all. He’ll kill for a feminine touch.

Perhaps it’s why he’d stopped at all to watch them, swans across their lake and yadda yadda, perhaps twice over why his shadow caresses the sidewalk behind him, reflection ahead sandwiching him into place.

It’s a new day, this one, brimming with opportunities he knows shall befit him in every last thread. That’s how life should feel, as though God Himself is patting his back, encouraging him onward. Without hesitation, he can do whatever his mind should set to. His insides scorching of shattered mirror burn only assures him even more so that he’s on the right path.

The routine forms a sunflower of life across the studio floors. At its center, girls huddle together, dip and rise all the same, until several break away in petals around them. He feels badly, almost, to watch her be chastised yet again once his place before the window distracts her into a short stumble.

Practice continues on with he the quiet audience earning only occasional side glances.

Something strikes him once he notes the way the crowd inside disperses from itself, blinking against however long’s just passed him by with hardly a realization. Afternoon grasps for purchase upon every surface.

He asks himself what he’s doing wasting his breath against the glass this way, then spots her with the very same expression on its second side, hands clutching idly the soft straps of a sports bag, lashes blinking as deep as the V of her neckline.

In a silent stroke, he lifts his hand to wave hello.

Anzu blinks another measure, and he doesn’t suppose it’s the greatest outcome to watch her head shake in such futility, bending down beyond his sight. When she rises again, her back is facing him, the licks of brunette that flare out upon her fanning hands. A jacket covers the spread of her skin. Beige and soft. He’d just love to touch it.

To him there must be in the thousands of possible reactions on her part once she brushes through the glass belled doorway. Of himself, he’s certain there’s just as many, yet has submerged himself so deeply in the suffocating smell of her perfume that there are, in the moment there, zero. Zero reaction, zero response. Hand to the door, it holds out beside her frozen form. And she watches him. For the first time. She watches him.

The first words he hears her utter do not come as her soft glossed lips take to parting, not as she stands before him with the world in her eyes and he balancing so precariously upon each fingertip. The first thing he hears her say, after so long it has been, startles him only for its poised carve of English.

“Oh! I’m sorry, excuse me,” Anzu’s perfect little mouth has to say, as behind her come a pair of ladies and their post-practice sweat that somehow is worn in such a divine way among their clavicles that he cannot be repulsed. The left girl’s taller than any woman he’s met, hair a pale orange tucked in a million bobby clips, and the other’s darker than himself and twice as beautiful in her curves and lashes and full puckered lips that sing, “Don’t worry about it, Téa. See you tomorrow!”

For so split a moment, it almost convinces him he’s been wrong all along, and this woman’s only staring at him in such wonder because she cannot place the stranger who’s made her a spectacle the last days’ time. He’s been wrong and he’s red all over to know it, until the very second he’s caught back at the collar to be brought to the gasping surface of a single word.

“Malik.”

Wetting his lips, he looks to her from the proximity clenched together on the breezy city sidewalk. They’re within distance enough to make her shampoo intoxicating. He watches as she tucks a stray lock behind one ear, every bangle blinking silver. Between her breasts, not that he’s looking- gold catches the sunlight.

Malik does not know who he is or where he stands when he makes his first move toward her, knows only the black of clenched lids ahead, the curtains of platinum blond shadowing the border of his face.

“I’m sorry,” is Malik Ishtar’s very first breath, in what feels so long as he’s been here in the new world he doesn’t care to know. His hands, they shake, pressed beside him and remaining strict in so decorous a bow forward. Quivers of tongue do not move it. It’s her moment, her place as queen over him. If she chooses, she could slap him stupid, toss a boot heel on his bobbing thyroid and demand he beg for his life.

Or...her nose could tickle with laughter, alert him into a questioning rise back straightened that only wrings him in more nonplus to find himself wrapped in two delicately toned arms. Beige and soft. In any other life, he’d revel in the sensation. For now, he’s dizzy.

“I can’t _believe_ you’re here!” remains still in the tongue of the land, to his mind and its rusted cogs’ chagrin. She speaks slowly enough for him to follow, at the least, and hugs tight enough to fold his lungs in pressure. As he’s released back, his biceps take refuge in her either palm until she’s decided she’s glanced him over a well enough time. They rest next to the bag strap slung over her shoulder, where she steps back into her own space there on the sidewalk outside the dance studio plate glass, and looks at him. And smiles. “What are you doing out here? Gosh, what’s it been...five years? What brings you to New York, of all places?”

“I…” starts his dimpling cheek with its huff held inside. He’s been in the states long enough, he can manage a fleshed out conversation in English _and_ a lie at the same time. “Business work.” Never does her smile fade as she looks onward to him, makeup impeccable for having danced the last two hours straight. That’s the thing about girls, Malik has noticed. They’re always impeccable. And the thing about Anzu is, she’s given him an ache in every breath. “...You aren’t upset?”

“Upset?” The light overhead crystalizes the windows of the shops down the streets, flickering through trees of skinny bark and lush green nest tops. She adjusts her bag in its place, glancing to him in a certain curiosity that fades against sucking upon her bottom lip and its impeccable, impeccable rose colored gloss. “Oh, Malik… After everything we’ve all been through together- you, and Yuugi, and the Pharaoh…”

She stops, bites again on her lip, harder this time. Suddenly, he isn’t her everything anymore, in the way her eyes settle with darkness to signal memory, slow and brutal on her bones, but she’s delicate in the way she shakes her head, stiffens her shoulders, smiles just for him. “Are you in a hurry? There’s a Starbucks right across the street, I think we should get coffee.”

“...Coffee,” he repeats, arms weightless to float bent up beside his chest, hands clenching forward as if to say more, to say anything. The gold braces upon his wrists and throat asphyxiate his throbbing pulse as he glances over one shoulder, does not squint in the omnipotent sunlight, mapping out the picture of the café across the morning road.

When he next looks to her, she is hardly so dainty with whipped foam painting her upper lip, but all the same is all the same to respect her flawless touch.

He isn’t entirely certain what he’s circulating into his bloodstream, but the _frappuccino_ as she’d called it, tastes of caramel and caffeine, and it wouldn’t be so polite to spit out a six dollar drink.

“Malik,” tips suddenly his chin to face her. Distractions are just lovely, but he’s here with her, here for her, glinting gold and gorgeous to plate his full attention ahead. She’s said his name, and _hesitated,_ nibbling on nothing but thought. She’s said his name hesitated and swallowed the nothing.

The window beside their seats reflects bright blue, perhaps somber somewhere. Her mirrored half self is all he finds himself grasping for, until it disappears and no longer does she looks so tired in grief as she is stern to look direct for him.

“If I’m honest with you, I still kind of do feel weird about everything that happened.” It feels like a hand pressing his chest, pressing and pressing, chest cold and palm hot. Rather, she waits, enough heat rising there to scald him. “But...I don’t hold grudges.”

And just like that, she’s smiling again. Again.

“As long as you really have changed, then there’s no reason to be mad at you.” A car passes that neither of them look to. The air sits thick with coming rain. Anzu lifts with those dainty fingers the condensation of her cup, straw poised to her lips just before they smirk, “It _was_ pretty creepy how you, like, went inside my brain, or whatever. Don’t try that again, and we should be fine. So, where are you staying now? Do you live around here?”

Without once moving, Malik fumbles. Everything down to the shine of the table top is a foreign taste.

“I’m staying at...the hotel, down the street,” he says in his clunky way, accent filling his mouth to feel as foam stuffed in. Fingers massage the fabric of thighs. If he licks his lips, he doesn’t notice. “You live here now? You dance?”

Perhaps he’d learned at least one thing from his father, so many million years ago it hardly matters now, but he knows that a half ounce of ruthlessness is healthy for a day. He doesn’t blather in pity, going over and over again his apologies no matter how many times she’s already called him exempt from scrutiny. Ishtars do not wallow in any pathetic color. No matter how thickly it’s pained to call himself that, it is all he knows, his existence in the body of Malik Ishtar who knows his limits and knows therapy is one of the greatest wonders the twenty first century has to offer.

So he moves on. Because she has. Because she’s smiling as she thumbs the whipped cream off its corner, another bend to lick it in a dainty lap and tilt her hair against one shoulder.

“Have you heard of Juilliard?”

Malik sits straight backed in his seat. There are hardly so many people seated here as there are waiting in the line to the rollercoaster front register. He’s perfectly polite, perched there as a fawn, watching the way her lips speak to him, though knows not only their motion so much as he does the deep bleeding scarlet of her pouring soul. Yes, that’s Anzu. The very same he’d met on the coast when they were both sixteen and didn’t know truth from a moonlight shadow.

He does not blink as she lifts a straw into a sip. Beside it, the gilded acres of his bangs wisp as his head shakes. Lightly.

“Well,” and her smile is as giddy as if she’s waited all her life to cover up boasting in explanation. But Anzu’s never like that. She’s only a gorgeous twenty year old with no one beneath her since a toe touched Western soil. “It’s a performing arts school. With a six percent acceptance rate. I auditioned, and they _loved_ me. I couldn’t believe it!”

“Oh,” Malik says, even though it’s the wrong thing, and he could do better but he’s breathless. “Wow…”

Anzu is not a conflict biter, not when she has him on her fingertips this way. In both palms she grasps her cup, leans forward just enough of a touch to gleam within the window light.

“It’s amazing. It’s _literally_ a dream come true. But that’s not even all of it.”

Fear, or wonder, or _something, God, something_ \- it’s in her eyes when she twists them left, right, hair swishing across both shoulders. She’s looking at something, or for something, or _something._ Like she’s here in secret, or every word from her could be her very last. He admires that in a person.

“Do you remember Kaiba? Ka- Seto Kaiba?”

A pistol’s just been loaded and plugged against his temple. Does he remember Kaiba Seto, the shadow spiraled within the crowds of disillusion. Remembering them all, it’s futile, by face and name, yet all the same a thousand fibers pill to every man and he would recognize them by their scent.

He remembers Kaiba Seto and his tall authority. The mystique that built him up ankles to throat. Yes, vaguely. Yes, every moment.

By the time he’s tripped upon a nod, she’s already poised to spin forward, hands clutching the table’s lip. “Well...I’m definitely not affording forty thousand dollar a year tuition and an apartment in Manhattan by myself.”

” _Yugh_ _,”_ his top lip sneers. “That’s...a lot.”

“Mhm,” hums against her straw. When she pops her lips, the gloss on them shimmers delicately within the light. Something Malik delights in, same as the dirty little pride mumbling its way upon them next. “It only takes _one_ bet against Kaiba to get him to do whatever you want. No wonder Yuugi has him wrapped around his finger these days- How proud of me are you to know that _I_ beat _Kaiba_ in a duel?” Her grin slips so boldly out she must wave a hand before it to keep her dainty appeal. In a clear of the throat, she gazes longingly to nothing, and says, “But that’s all...water under the bridge, now. It doesn’t matter, I wanna hear about you. You’re staying in a hotel around here? Is it the Hilton down the street? So you’re just visiting, then. Oh! Is your sister here with you? And you have a brother, too, right?”

If he could blink anymore- well, he isn’t certain he would, as it occurs to him he’s probably already circled the same dust around his retinas forty five times, sitting there across from her still trying to process what she’d been saying about Kaiba Seto funding her Hilton hotel. Or- no, it hadn’t been that. But he’d heard both of them, so he’s listening, at the very least.

Wetting his lip, its divots and dried veins, Malik leans forward, stares at himself in the contorted plastic reflection of his drink top, stares at her blush pink beauty, like a wedding dress with all the most ornate trimmings.

“Sorry, could you repeat that?” He’d like most to slip into Arabic, but he’ll meet her halfway, at least. His Japanese is quiet and practiced, though he’s close to betting on there being no judgement from lingering ears. New York City is the most sweat drenched part of the pot.

Anzu looks almost in fever for a moment, averting both eyes elsewhere as fingers tuck hair behind its ear. The pendant sings on her chest. Hardly a moment later, she’s straight forth to him again, smiling in what may be the slightest synthetic, but he assumes the syrup in his drink isn’t handcrafted caramel either.

“Just wondering how you’ve been doing,” she repeats to him upon that middle ground. His ears catch their breath. She tilts her head enough to release the brunette right back away from its prior tuck. “If you’re leaving soon, I want plenty of time to hang out first.”

_Oh, no,_ his hands seem to say in a hundred different definitions, in their lift to splay and wave between them. “I- um...no,” he blunders around, throat tight against its gilded decorations. “...I live here. For now.”

“That’s great!” she’s just a bit too quick to say. Malik eyes the way she catches her phone screen a moment, the way the drinks giggle on her rise and the clutch of her bag so near herself she’s practically already vanished.

Because she’s a lady, he pretends he’s a gentleman and rises alongside her, five inches separating them that cure how pathetic he’s felt in behavior.

“That’s really great,” her sudden flit focus seems to repeat. “I definitely want to see you and catch up more. Let’s get dinner together. Are you going to watch practice again tomorrow? You could probably come inside, you know. I don’t think Miss Elena would mind…”

He’s too good to admit the thought never occurred to him, yet too ill to wish the idea followed through. Either way- he’s nodding to her, clutching nothing but the feel of a hand warm on his arm and irises that shine cosmetically blue this morning.

He watches her leave.

Two sips deep, a caramel frappuccino drops fatly into the trashbin beside his hip.


	3. Chapter 3

After he’d stood in the rain for two hours, burning both pupils against plate glass, Anzu had cooed something he for the life of him could not decipher, and offered him her cell phone number. She’d laughed, then, clicking on about how asinine it was of her to not think of it beforehand. She’d laughed, and that’s the only reason Malik hadn’t been done with the whole ordeal there and then. She’d laughed.

They’d split a cab, one she offered to foot the whole tab for just to keep him from walking in the rain, one he’d told the driver to put entirely on his card, because Anzu for all her intelligence could sit dumbly there whilst they exchanged in Malik’s native tongue. Such a relief it’d been to cling onto familiarity like that, he’d’ve paid off a million miles just to keep touch with that golden eyed driver.

That had been a close week ago, now. On occasion, Malik will lay his thin self across the armchair in his room, staring at his cell phone screen, staring. Sometimes he wonders what his sister would think if he called, sometimes he wonders what she thinks over the fact that he doesn’t. He doesn’t think she’d take so kindly to requesting his motorcycle be shipped overseas. Rishid would do it, though. In a heartbeat. How sickening.

Rental cars will do. He’s got to put his ID to some kind of use.

Sometimes he stares at his phone and thinks of his family, and sometimes, of Anzu. Her parents had done well with that name. She’s the perfect little peach blossom in the palm of his hands, delicate and drinking sunlight upon its soft curves.

And that’s what happens on those sometimes where he thinks of Anzu; he could just about drain into his seat for how long he sits mesmerized by the theory of her. So deeply has his mind run now that when- and it’s what’s sparked the thoughts at all -his phone begins to tremble in one hand, he’s startled into sitting straight, heartbeat in the throat at the notion of answering.

(As, for certain, it’s been some lick of black magic that’s connected their minds together at the very same moment to lead his dreaming of her to her contact flashing atop the screen).

“H- ...Hello? Anzu?”

And when she speaks to him, just to him, he can hear the smile carved into it, which is the reason he spends his evening cornered between a line of sweating suits all waiting for a table at the same restaurant. It just opened, recently, it won’t be too busy. That’s what she’d said. Pressed up on the bench of the lobby waiting area, he leers at her crossed legs, the way the thighs hardly kiss themselves beneath her achingly tiny chiffon skirt, and thinks how badly he’d like to shave his scalp off.

Anzu perches beside him without scathe. He makes up a story in his head to pass the silent time here waiting, pretends he knows she’s used to this from so many trips on the subway. Or perhaps they’re on the subway now, together, and they’d been standing with hands only clutching the handles when a sharp turn would send one or the other stumbling, laughing against each other till tears spring because...a party- that’s where they’ve come from. One of Anzu’s American friends had thrown a party in her studio apartment and he’d had so many hands on him and drinks thrown his way that he cannot even be certain he’s wearing the same shirt he’d left the house in. That’s the type of meta shit his teeth grind in agony for. And- oh, yes. Now they’ve got seats, because two people had gotten off on the last stop, so they’ve filled the empty spots together and very idly, if he listens, beyond the slow whistle of Anzu’s breath, he can make out the tune of a Ramones song coming from the speakers of someone’s phone along the sea of passengers. He doesn’t know how he knows it, but he does, fitting idyllically in with the culture around him.

“Oh, is that mine?”

Sudden, but surely, the subway halts to drop them back out on the stuffy bench of the max capacity restaurant that won’t be busy at all. Starlight bothers the glass behind their heads. Malik prays it won’t trespass upon nighttime before they’re done here. But Anzu has spoken, that’s what’s most pressing to him now. Along with the question, just a quiet one, she fumbles to unlatch the purse on her lap and dig a fresh manicure throughout its contents, of which Malik notes is plentiful. Cluttered, he’d say, but he doesn’t, as what matters most is held in one perfect hand and lifted to face her. All in one movement, it seems, she folds the top latch back over the purse, pinches her nose in some sort of uncertain disinterest, then tosses the look away the fix stray hairs and smile as she answers the call rumbling upon her cell phone.

Malik, though he’s no business with this business to begin with, wonders still why she holds the device such a length from her face, until the connection symbol fades off to reveal a face he, in earnesty, never expected to see again.

“Hi, Yuugi!” bleats Anzu. “What’s up?”

He keeps his distance as to play a spectator to the video call. Anzu smiles keenly, while on the other side of the screen and the world, Mutou Yuugi blinks back, stumbling almost endearingly with accented English to accommodate her first greeting. Something tells Malik he’s accustomed to her. Habitual. “Ah, I got it right this time? It’s not the middle of the night?”

While they the pair exist in dusk, the call displays a generously lit backdrop and a color on Yuugi’s face, aside from the concern, that looks refreshed. Morning. He wonders what time it is at home, if his family is sleeping whether it be night or not.

Eyeing herself idly in the camera lens, Anzu grooms a strand of brunette to neatness, offering a grin shortly after. “Yep. We’re just about to have dinner, actually.”

“Oh!” And the concern had died at her assurance, yet clambers back with guilt to feel himself a disturbance. Some things don’t change, Malik supposes, pinpointing one of those as Yuugi’s people pleasing attitude, even if his face has grown a bit less round. “I’m sorry, don’t let me interrupt. You said _we?_ Are you with Ro-?”

Without time to practice or pose, the camera is shifted to expose them both in the frame; an instinct comes to Malik to hide his face, though the arm that jerks pauses midway once he notices the way Yuugi _looks_ at him.

“Muh- Malik?! M-Malik Ishtar?” Two hands come to cover Yuugi’s mouth. The shock manifests in his every fiber. Malik blinks, close to shame, in some sort, to be ogled as though an exhibit or escapade. He would hope Anzu doesn’t take the value of the reaction for normality. Not especially once the screen is free of faces and they’re left to stare at the blank expanse of the room on the other end.

Anzu tilts the phone toward her to examine it in blinks, prompting Malik to inch into her space, fit his face above her shoulder and stare forward. Waiting. Ever so subtly, if he strains, there’s noise muffling from somewhere, sounds that eat him as they approach nearer each second.

Yuugi returns. Something of sorrow fills his look.

At his side, a figure follows, then all together enters eye to eye combat when the phone is snatched to a lift before another.

“You,” cuts Kaiba Seto’s crisp certainty through the expensive speaker of Anzu’s phone. He does not bother with pleasantries, nor with English, something Malik notices more as the strangers around them side eye, shift further from them down the bench. Yet, it doesn’t matter- none of it, none but the accusing snarls leaving stab after stab in his flesh. “Do you have any idea how much trouble you’ve caused in my life over the last six months? Or are you too busy only caring about yourself to notice the world around you?”

Briefly, softly, he hears the monster’s name be demanded in a harsh whisper, a tip that leaves him questioning what Kaiba Seto is doing at all in the same frame as Mutou Yuugi so suddenly, but he hasn’t the time. No one does. “...I-“

“Hang on, Kaiba,” Anzu insists. Malik can sense it, just below the surface, that same fire she’s always had inside her. A flame that will flicker at the first sign of danger. That Mazaki’s a protector. Her eyes narrow within their mascara. She’s a China doll that rents rooms inside her heart to devilry. “What are you talking about? What could Malik have done to you? You haven’t seen him in years.”

“Lucky me,” the other bites. His chest is broad, what he can see of it, tight slick to the shirt on it. Of all of them, Malik decides Kaiba has changed the least from age eighteen to now, physically the same heartthrob and emotionally the same horrendous bastard. The camera angle shifts, _hardly,_ but just enough to make a difference in how strictly those eyes cut into him. “I don’t care what you do with your life. Run away, become a dirty homeless rat. It doesn’t concern me. But for the love of God, call your fucking sister and tell her you aren’t dead in a gutter somewhere.”

The couple ahead of them vanishes. Anzu does not move to absorb the new space. Malik does not breathe.

“My...sister?” A swallow works its way down. It’s fresh morning across the globe and what he wouldn’t give to be there. “What about my sister? You’ve been in contact with her?”

“Only because I can’t avoid it.” His molars dot tautly together. “She’s been in Japan for months trying to find you. I can’t get away from her incessant whining, begging me to use my technology and influence to somehow track you down. As if I need something like that to worry about.” Kaiba’s eyes close faintly, a click forming through his teeth. “If she’s that concerned, she should just use all of her _magic_ to figure out where you are.”

“Can I have my phone back, please?” A rustling, one Malik can only picture as fingers gripping the rich fabric of a sleeve, though he knows not anything but his flaming heart.

Vaguely, a scuffle shifts the focus, though it returns in a dark glare. “Get that annoying sister of yours out of my life before I do it myself.”

Malik tightens harshly against the threat. Beside him, a fist clenches, relaxes.

As the view focuses back upon Yuugi alone, he’s a mile more scattered than before, blinking and nibbling on words he cannot find. “I- I’m sorry, Malik. He doesn’t mean it. I know he really does care about you and Ishizu-”

“I can’t stand that bitch.”

“-and he’s spent a lot of time looking for you.” Yuugi glances off camera a moment, then pokes his nose back forward, expression gentle. “He has a soft spot for little brothers.”

Silence caters to them. Malik stares.

“We’ll talk again soon, Anzu. I had a question, actually, but- but it can wait.” Across the screen, Yuugi exhales a meter of faith, attention dancing up next upon Malik. “I hope we can talk more too, Malik. It’s been so long. Maybe Seto and I could take a trip out to see you both sometime. But, either way...please try to call your sister. She really is worried about you. I was, too.” Something in Yuugi’s smile is tired, something else a film of intrigue. “Bye, Anzu. Enjoy your dinner.”

“You, too- I mean, um, good morning.” She cringes at herself, laughing it away as she brings the device more toward her. A wave lifts up toward the screen, one Yuugi returns before the line goes quiet. Anzu replaces her phone in her pocket book. The evening gleams golden orange.

“...I’m so sorry about that,” she murmurs, head ducked toward the lap. “Me and Yuugi don’t get a lot of time to talk to each other, so I didn’t want to not take his call. If I had known Kaiba was there… _Jeez,_ not to sound like Jounouchi, but you’d think getting laid would mellow that guy out a bit more.”

Unpacking everything she’s said drives him dizzied. A set of blinks. Another stare. “Um…”

“Gardner?”

Her eyes dazzle toward the hostess, grips on her bag as both legs fold up from under her. “That’s us,” she says, flicking a gaze down to him. “But we don’t have to go in if you aren’t up to it anymore. I know that phone call was a lot to take in. We can-“

“I...want to go in,” he stands to tell her, watching her flinch the slightest as he does. “Sorry. I’m alright. We’ve been waiting so long, it would be stupid to just go home.”

Silently, within the windless room, she peers to a side from where comes a throat cleared into fist, a smile looming after as she nods to him.

They walk inside from the foyer together, and she’s stunning. It isn’t the falling all over each other on the subway type stunning (though it’s missed, in his mind), rather Anzu with her thousand mile dancer’s legs made even longer by silver heels that glimmer with every step. The restaurant’s one of those where the lighting’s low and the waitstaff don’t joke, just the right ambiance for Malik to tell he’ll be wasting half a shift’s worth of pay on one meal. For some reason, he feels that as a knife in the spine, whereas the last interaction with Kaiba had been for comparison a gut punch. He doesn’t... _care_ as much as he should. He doesn’t. He sits awake at night with the wall lamp on wondering how often Ishizu and Rishid think of him the same way, yet to _know_ is to shrug and wish he bore less presence. If he calls his sister, she’ll make him come home, and if he doesn’t call his sister, Kaiba will mount his head above the fireplace, but perhaps he’d be happier there.

But Anzu. Anzu is stunning. She even lays a hand beneath her skirt before she sits, something seen previously only in cinema.

“The food here is amazing,” she says after they’ve propped up menus across from one another. Malik squints around the font. “I don’t remember if they have them in Japan or not, but the cheesecake is to die for. Hence the name, I guess.”

“Uh huh.” Half focus plays with her words, though he’d rather pour himself deliberate and full into reading tiny text of letters he does not understand in this close to pitch dark room. Yes. An evening out.

At the minute mark, napkin edges flutter to his menu laying down to the tabletop. Anzu folds her own back to peer in curiosity at his pointing finger. “Does this have meat in it?”

She blinks her lashes a few notes, bending the awkward angle of her neck to better read the bold line. “Filet Mignon? Well, considering that’s a steak dinner, yes, there’s meat in it.”

Flush curls Malik back against his booth seat, tipping the menu up toward his nod as she goes on, “There’s pasta and salads on the next page. Do you like spinach lasagna? Or carbonara… Oh, you can still have dairy, right?”

One nail scratches his temple. He’d be better off blind here, he thinks.

When he’s close enough to failure’s admittance, a quiet glaze rings about them, one that draws his nose up to meet the glance across. “The waitress should be over soon. Have you thought about a drink? They're on the back page.”

Though he hasn’t asked it of her, he does not spurn the guidance of sweet fingertips finding his way toward a thick list of beverages. Wistfully, she loses one breath. “That’s one thing I miss about being home sometimes. I have to wait another few months before I can order cocktails.” Mirth returns to her before he can decipher whether or not it’s been meant in candor. “Oh, well. Drinking is just empty calories anyway.”

Her smile shines where light does not exist. If he could, he’d call her a kitten, lift her by the very scruff just to call his own. But he doesn’t. Not now.

As promised, there’s a black clad woman sweeping over toward them to beg a drink order in the next minute, to which Anzu says, “Water with lemon, please. Is that good for you, too, Malik?”

Pen in hand, the woman is nodding the same breath she pierces him with attention. Blue eyes box him in on the second side. He blinks, mumbling nothing to himself as he scours the blank white slate of his dead gaze downward. All at once, he’s lifted back up again to choke back every last anxiety and sting, “Strawberry martini.”

Cornerly he watches the way Anzu’s interest tides forth, yet is too inclined by request that draws two fingers thinly to a pocket. Once handed her way, the waitress nods and smiles at the card in a scribble to float away again.

“Let me see that,” Anzu orders, dirty ludicrousy shaping her grin as Malik passes his ID next her way. After a scan, she coughs a laugh along with eyes that swivel high. “Like _hell_ you’re twenty five! Where did you even get this thing? ...You’re not up to anything illegal, are you?”

Malik somewhat cares to point out that right before her eyes just now he was, by law, up to something illegal, but he retrieves the ID back to pocket and say null of it. His earrings jingle as he shakes his head. It could be enough to placate her, though the thin of her peering is wary at best.

Two glasses set wetly to the table. Anzu orders something he’s never heard of, but is eager to lay sight upon. He’d like to absorb as much information on her as he can. That’s just Malik.

“At least give me a sip,” she whispers once the waitress has gone again, like it’s scandal, like it should curl her toes in their spot. He looks to her until the half bitten smirk she spins moves his own mouth to curve, pushing with his fingertips the glass’ base.

“I got it for you,” he says. “Alcohol isn’t halaal.”

If he’s honest, he doesn’t expect her to understand him, though it’s a nice change of pace.

Perhaps she’s cultured, or perhaps she’s just a naughty young woman, but Anzu does not ask questions, only dips her eyes left and right before downing a gulp that swells both cheeks. She swallows, coughing, silverware clinking down to the table in her frantic flick of a napkin to her mouth. Malik would worry if he hadn’t seen its grin just before disappearing behind a wipe.

There’s lipstick marks on the napkin when she lays her hand down again, gripping it still. The girl he’s just met isn’t the same swan behind the dance studio window. She’s better.

“You know, you’re a way nicer guy than I remember,” she sniffs, lips massaging together as if to think upon it more, a tilt of the jaw to join. “I hope that doesn’t come across wrong. It’s just...last time we met, there was so much going on that I don’t even think we spoke to each other. That ceremonial duel took up all my attention.” She sighs as she says it. Malik doesn’t blame her. “And the last time before that, _you_ were the one taking up everybody’s attention. I guess the only time I ever thought about you then was about how much I hated you.” He could wince. She taps her nail on the base of the glass. “I never expected that the guy who controlled my mind and killed half my friends would be buying me a drink someday.”

The way she japes feels hollow, putting vulgar honesty out in the open to forgo accepting its ache. Between them, the lights are low and the crowd hush, and Malik does not smell her perfume so much as the sadness on her breath.

“...That wasn’t who I really am,” he says. Sleeves would’ve been a smart idea tonight. “That wasn’t really even _me._ You understand that, don’t you?”

Idly, she sips. A shade within those eyes reads intensity to match his own.

Fingers pinch the table ledge. Every syllable is a bite of iron to him, yet all the same he’d be nowhere with it all weighing on him without release. Something he’s fought guns blazing his whole life- the vulnerability of allowing his heart to speak for him.

“Anzu,” he calls to her. “I apologize. Everything that happened because of my presence in your life is unspeakable. I was controlled by hatred and anger... But that wasn’t all me. I… You know I had dissociative identity disorder, don’t you?”

When he looks up again, it’s all too inappropriate to laugh, but it’s only so amusing to him the way she sets down her empty drink and asks, “Past tense?”

Hands ball to his lap. Eyes shut, he breathes several notes. “I like to think so. The other self you witnessed does not reside within me anymore, I know that for certain. I’ve been freed of that, and all the agony that plagued me in my younger years.”

Sometime between his bleeding chest and her listening, bated and dauntless, plates set to the table, and after one slide of a cup his way, he hears Anzu’s delectable voice cuff, “He’ll have another martini, please.”

In theory, Malik should recall the twenty minutes ago where he’d placed his order, yet glancing down at some tiny portion of noodles flaked in fancy basil does not seem very akin to his interests. The dish across from him is an elegant layering of spinach and chicken. Anzu, he decides, is jarringly cute.

“You know, I wondered,” she says, low, sipping her water until it can be traded for another vial of tart pink spirit. He leans closer to catch her words, to marinate within them. “I knew you were different somehow. I wondered why you didn’t have any...ancient self, in the afterlife. And the way the Pharaoh acted around the ring spirit compared to how he treated you- well, not _you_ you. You know what I mean.” Liquid courage. Right down her throat. “It was always _weird_ to me. Like, why would you be the one with the Millennium Rod, if Kaiba was the one who held it originally? It just didn’t make sense.”

“Maybe it’s why he resents me,” Malik murmurs, only partially in jest.

Anzu snorts her amusement. The first bite of dinner works its way between her teeth, setting the fork down soon after to tap fingernails along the table wood. “No matter what, I’m glad you’re safe. I’ve had more fun seeing you this past week than I think I have my whole two years living here.”

He finds himself hot underneath her honesty. She’s a sweet one, though not one he’d expect such a declaration from so soon. Then he glances at the empty glass.

Half of dinner is gone by the time he again speaks.

“You said you live in Manhattan?” His spoon scrapes absently. “Is that nearby?”

Anzu looks an angel as she chews part of one cheek, bobbing her head just enough to make the short lengths of her hair dance. “Well, yes. We’re there right now. But you live about a half hour away.”

Hot honey, all in his guts, all smolderingly thick to know now how far she’s gone to pick him up tonight in that dingy 2007 model she drives. Malik swallows. “So you...you drive that far just to go to practice everyday?”

“Not everyday. And usually I take the subway instead. It’s just easier.” There’s something in her mouth as she speaks. Perhaps a withheld detail. “But it’s worth it either way, that studio is _super_ elite and hard to get accepted into. The instructor is tough as nails. I’m lucky to be there.”

“Oh. That’s...um, Ju...Jul-?”

“I noticed your drink was empty, no obligation.”

The waitress flashes an aquarium glass smile as she sets a third martini to the table, ducking herself back off again as a thank you bows forward. Anzu makes eye contact with her reflection in the cup, tilts no move to claim it.

“Juilliard,” she smiles, an imp of delight. “No, Juilliard is a college, but most of the people who go to that studio are from there.”

“I see,” he sees. A cough, a purse. He isn’t sure how much time has passed or how many more stars have accumulated, and he isn’t sure why it is that he’s compelled to glance forward. It’s instinct. He glances forward toward Anzu, her and her sparkling laugh as she sips the fresh drink and keeps her eyes sharp on his own. When the glass sets down again, it is her brisk little _ahh_ of breath that accompanies it, and it is her fingers that pluck the strawberry off the rim to hold forward for his mouth. Malik can feel his mouth cringe, but being impolite leaves far worse a scar, so he lets her feed him a bite before he draws back against his own space.

“You really are a nice guy…” comes almost as a sigh from her, wrist clinking to the table with the stem dropped beside it, forgotten. Anzu rests a cheek in one palm. Before he has the chance to admire her, she’s sprung up again, moving to rest a grasp on her purse strap. “I’m gonna go to the lady’s room, then we should get the check. While I’m gone...I think you should give Ishizu a call. From what Yuugi and Kaiba said…” Standing aside their booth, she’s watched neath his violet eye, does not meet them until her head shakes and she’s white knuckled upon that purse strap. “Sorry, it’s none of my business. I’ll be right back.”

He watches her walk away.

In some section of him, should he be divided to compartments where emotion and logic do not intertwine, he knows she’s right, knows Kaiba Seto had been right just the same to call out his careless, unbeating heart. Just maybe it’s the allure of a city night that’s made him callous. His ethics have not remained so staid as they’d been half a year ago, he knows that much. Malik’s life, for all it has settled, does not know consistency, other than the constant fact that he has never stayed the same for long.

He owes it to her. Perhaps, even, if he cannot look at it that way alone, he owes it to himself.

Anzu isn’t a spot in sight, so he reaches beneath himself to the cut of a jean pocket. His phone drags out. One long fingertip scrapes along its screen until its lifted to echo the swell of blood in his ear.

“...Hi,” careens his voice. “I can’t make it tonight. Something’s come up.”

On the other end of the line, his most recent boss shuffles paperwork, he hears, clunks something dully to a desktop.

 _“You’re killing me, you know that?”_ It’d taken Malik a good while to grow used to awkward Arabic accented in East Coast thickness. It clicks even thicker when pinched in ire. Like now. _“Fuck me over again, and that’s it.”_

An involuntary swallow wets his throat. “Yes,” he says, once the line has already died.

By the time he’s no longer sole, the check’s already come and gone with a handful of bills slipped inside. He isn’t perfect on conversion rates, though he’s quick enough to know nineteen dollars is vomitous to pay for a plate of pasta. Three martinis had run him another fifteen, and that had been where he’d stopped reading the tab and thrown the rest of the cash in hand down within the plastic slip. Anzu returns to him shortly afterward, primped and prim and smelling of spearmint, which amplifies as she goes indignantly on all the way to the parking lot about how he should have let her split the check. He smiles tightly at her rant, knowing her irritation to be only a touch true, catching her by the elbow when her heel hooks into a pavement crack.

Two hands plant firmly to the car’s side. She breathes, shallowly, tips her chin up toward him to catch moonlight in her dilated eyes.

“Can I ask you a favor? ...Do you mind driving?” Keys tug from the mess of her purse to swing on one finger. Her words come shyly. “I know I’m not _drunk,_  but I just don’t want to risk anything…”

He thinks she’d call it teasing her if she could fully see his smirk.

They clip into place quietly. Truth be told, Malik’s never handled such a machine before, only once during the road test to obtain his first license- right, and the time Ishizu had asked him to back up toward the house to unload the groceries, and she’d’ve been down a backlight if Rishid hadn’t been there to barehandedly stop her Civic in its tracks.

Malik adjusts his grip on the steering wheel. It can’t be much different than a bike.

Three miles on the road and still they breathe, so Malik decides he’s been correct.

Every so often, a finger will lift to guide him on the correct path. “We’re almost there,” Anzu assures his stiff shoulders. They relax at the soothe of her voice, the crisp veracity that flows once she’s melted to enough comfort in the passenger seat. “I want to tell you, I’ve actually never drank before. That was my first time.”

“It was?” He can only be sure she’s nodded due to the silence that follows, until again she trills, “It feels kinda _good_ , to be honest. I feel like an adult for the first time in a while.”

Though he chortles through touching teeth, Malik does motion forth, “There’s more to adulthood than alcohol.”

“Right, I know,” she says, smirking. “There’s drugs, too.”

If he knew how he’s felt the past week, he’d know his skin is a phenomenal warmth now, knows he’s past relaxed and doesn’t know why he knows it. Something about the familiarity of Anzu’s blue eyes and spinning hips, the way she hums to the radio and the way she says his name; if Malik knew what his life wanted to do, he’d feel the purring of its long insatiable throat as he coasts through the darkened night with Mazaki Anzu at his side.

“I can call you a cab, if you aren’t comfortable here,” she’s repeating to him once they’ve climbed to the second floor, silver heels hooked in her hand and house keys in the other. “It wouldn’t be any trouble at all, so don’t say you’re fine if you really aren’t.”

“I’m fine,” Malik laughs, hushed, etiquette that finds him naturally in the unlit hall. The look she gives him, the _oookaaay_ lift of both eyebrows- it’s funny, that’s all, and it’s funny how she fumbles with the key in the knob before releasing the latch to allow them inside.

He hears her shoes drop to the floor, but does not see them. Too busy is he soaking in every square inch of the apartment he’s been permitted inside, a cavern of intimacy for his sight to behold. No clothes on the floor. Granted, he’s only seen the living room thus far, but...how wonderful. Instinct leaves his shoes by the door.

“Just be quiet if you can, okay?” Anzu asks of him. “I don’t know if… Oh.”

The door they’d entered is one of many stemming off this room. A square, neat living room with a front entry and two left hand doors both shut, a couch on the wall paired with its television set and bay window, and just off to its left, another entry into where he can see tile and a stove side due to the light inside. Anzu’s gaze trails the same way, to that light they’ve just noted together. Wonder furrows up him. All too suddenly, it quells.

The kitchen light flicks off.

Malik blinks.

Through that same archway, he squints to find the outline of an approaching figure- a person, if he should guess. A man. Tall and broad. A dirty blond. Dirty.

“You’re home,” the new voice greets, knocking him nearly to his ass for no reason other than unexpectation. As though they’ve been thrown upon his flesh, he _feels_ the eyes that walk up and down him.

A distance past, Anzu glances to the man leant on the kitchen trim and says, “Yeah. We just had dinner and a few drinks. This is Malik, he’s the one I’ve been telling you about.”

“Drinks?” His tone turns cheeky as he saunters toward them, toward _her,_ wraps her up in his arms in such a swift pull it makes her yelp before a shake of the head. He squeezes her waist. “My good little Téa went out and committed underage drinking?”

Malik watches her breathe. “Just one,” she swears, pushing against his chest to leave herself freed. If he squints again, she’s smiling, so it’s fine. Right. And he sees, too, the way her finger gestures at he the silent third, prompting the other to gruffly extend, “Rowan,” all but mincing Malik’s fingers as they exchange a handshake.

“Don’t be like that,” chides Anzu’s eyeroll, a pat of a palm upon his chest. “Malik, this is my boyfriend, Rory.”

“He can call me Rowan,” Rory insists, in such a way as if it were a funny little joke while Malik can sense the profound roots of animosity ensnaring the guy head to goddamn toe.

Anzu pats his chest again, smirking how she does for him so frequent. “I’ll get you some blankets, Malik. Couch is okay, right?”

Planted in his same place, Malik listens to the beat of Rory’s steps following after her toward the bedroom she enters. “Oh, so you’re having a guest over?”

The door closes behind them.

Malik fidgets with the solid gold piercing through one lobe. He hadn’t been invited to sit down, gazing on at the sofa behind him like a longing lover. A split moment purses his lips before catching an inhale. Gusto. He steps forward toward it to perch himself on a cushion. It’s only comfortable until he realizes its juxtaposition to the thin bedroom wall.

 _“Can you stop it?”_ muffles in a harsh whisper just behind his head. _“If you had a problem with it, you could have told me before I left.”_

Cheeks suck inward, pop softly back out. Malik can recall, if he must, the most aged arguments betwixt his father and elder siblings, more often than not being his brother launching forward to protect him. Rishid would mouth off to no one unless it concerned Malik’s safety. Ishizu had been similar growing up, though learned to hold her own as she began to maze through the outside world into adulthood. His father would argue, shout, threat, and someone would shout and threat and argue back until he could just barely make out the steps ahead of him through glossed eyes and he’d be led by the hand to a back bedroom. It would be quiet there, not silent, but quiet enough to keep his heart from imploding upon itself. If it were Ishizu, which it most often would be, she’d hum to him, something of their mother’s favorite classical lyricist. Were it Rishid, Malik would be allowed to stomp his apoplectic little self around the room until every drop of anger was released and he’d lay himself down there in his brother’s lap.

_“What is wrong with you? He doesn’t even like girls!”_

That’s news to Malik. He blinks a few times, hand massaging the metal rings suddenly far too tight around his neck.

 _“That’s what you said about the guy who pays your rent, too.”_ It’s that other voice, the one he does not yet trust and cannot foresee himself caring to. Shortly, Anzu quips back, _“The guy who pays_ our _rent is engaged.”_

_“You always have an excuse. What’s it gonna be if I walk in on you in bed with another guy? Is he gonna be a faggot too?”_

_“Will you shut the fuck up?”_ The tremor of her whispers tips high, sounding just over his shoulder. He clamps a hand to one knee. She said it’d be no trouble at all. But...there’s some flavor of fire in him the same as she.

_“Jesus, you’re such an asshole sometimes. Just be nice, he’ll be gone in the morning, okay?”_

And like that, the knob rustles, and she’s smiling.

A folded throw blanket sets to the sofa arm. She’s alone beside him, and he worries if he stares as deeply as he does now that he’ll send a crack up her porcelain base.

“There’s some pillows out here, I can get you more if you like.” She sniffs once. He’s stupefied by her acting skills.

“...That’s okay. Thank you.” The window allows in only night. Behind his ribcage pounds a new pulse. “You’re sure it’s alright that I stay here?”

“Of course!” She has the audacity to tap a hand to his shoulder. Her other fingers all wave. “You paid, like, fifty bucks for that dinner. I owe you.”

Such benevolence spawns an illness in his gut.

When they say goodnight, Anzu is kind enough to shut the lamp off for him. Against the dark his eyes open, and do not shut again until sun shatters the sheer curtain length.

Between those two points, Malik writhes. It isn’t right of him to be here for the sake of himself and the ones within the wall behind him. He can’t stand to lay there, hear his own breathing, feel his own heart, watch what his mind makes up in the depthless black overhead. A point comes in which he curls himself into the crevice between cushions and couch back, nose fitting into the same gap that steals pocket change, remotes, gum wrappers- but it still isn’t right. Not with the way it amplifies the sound through the wall. If he’s to hear another _stop it,_ or its chasing twin of  _I said stop it!_ one more time, he thinks he’d brave the night if only to grip a kitchen knife.

By sunrise, he isn’t sure if he’s slept. He’s sure he doesn’t look as princely as he likes, though, once Anzu’s hair is framing her face on a downward peer at him. She giggles.

“Good morning. You look like you’ve had quite the night.” Her legs are cream comfort from tight shorts. Arms extend into a stretch that stuffs her chest. “I hope you were comfortable enough, at least.”

Between his two legs, he fights with the blanket to untangle himself, slinging it sightlessly over the couch back to allow his gaze be pierced by morning. Across the floor, light flows in. The room sits as a chamber of gold with a view of the cityscape. Kaiba certainly spared no expense.

“It was fine…” It does not take long for his mind to wander, watching her circle what he can see of the kitchen from his seat, the way she bends and reaches and lives. He pretends he’s no eyes at all when she steps his way, until the grasp of a duffel bag finds its path to her shoulder and he feels sorely out of place. “Oh. Do you have dance practice?”

“Mhm.” Her glance spares toward the black flats she slips each foot into. A finger draws hair behind one ear. “Rory took the car to work. Interested in riding the subway with me back to your hotel?”

Still sticky with morning, he rubs across both eyelids, exhaling hard to push himself up to his feet.

In Malik’s head, the New York metro is a fantastical place, a high speed network of spaceships that shuttle their passengers place to place. Love happens on the subway. Out of every method of public transportation, he thinks the subway must be the most romantic.

That changes after his first ride on the subway.

He’d felt guilty striding past the man of dark skin and shaved hair without leaving a few extra dollars in his splayed open guitar case, but Anzu had already gotten so far ahead of him. Losing her in such a crowd may as well be a bullet in his head. He doesn’t know how the man would respond to hearing he reminded Malik of his brother, either, so he’ll save the money for breakfast later.

There aren’t any lingering party flavors or Ramones on this trip. Like his daydreams, he and Anzu both grasp onto the ceiling handles without an open seat in sight. When one frees, he tips a gesture toward it, and she stares a brief moment before shaking her head. Malik drops his arm. He keeps his place standing there with a grip on a handle. The seat fills quickly in time.

“It’s just a short walk. Down this way.”

He’s near breathless to keep up with her, the way her practiced legs do not stall a single step nor falter as his own. That sweaty sort of fatigue lines his skin like a fleece. At the very least she’s correct, as having a subway spot one block from a hotel is prime for confused tourists such as himself.

They stop just outside the gilded poles of the front awning. On a shoulder, her bag strap adjusts deeper into her angular bones, looking to him without word but a dictionary sung in either eye.

“Thanks for hanging out,” she says. The summer air catches up to him. “We still have more catching up to do, though. Wanna see a movie or something? Or maybe just come over to my place again. I’m done with class at one tomorrow.”

In a gust, he exhales, hands mapping the divots of either hip. She laughs into a curled finger. He can’t focus like this.

“Think about it, and text me later.” Warmth attaches to him the faint moment her hand brushes his. “I’ll see you. Bye!”

“Wait-!” stops her turn at one shoulder. He straightens. If only he could pluck those dictionaries open now, study them till the spines cracked back just to figure out a way to describe her. “You… I- Let me walk you to the studio?”

Again she faces him, biting back a smirk until it cannot keep itself from blossoming.

“Get some rest, Malik.” Her body dismisses him backward. Courtesy is a waved hand. “I’ll see you.”

He watches her walk away, down the sidewalk, gone.

He trails back home in the same clothes he left in the night before, wondering what it would ever feel like to know a purposed truth.


	4. Chapter 4

_Anzu: so tomorrow at 3? at the theater on Faith St.?_

_Anzu: you know how to get there right?_

His phone underlines the destination, offering him directions on a click.

_Malik: Yes. That sounds good. Dinner after?_

In his room, the curtains sit drawn to shield the plaster of dark. The day’s rather ruined him, sleeping so long unto its depth as to lie awake now, night heavy atop his chest, screen light less blinding with the pair of wall lamps that join it.

The message lays afront his newly woken eyes longer than he’d like.

Three dots to the left.

_Anzu: only if you let me pay_

Laughing alone is one of those odd little mannerisms human beings picked up from nowhere. No one wants to laugh alone. His lips quiver against themselves.

_Malik: Of course. Goodnight._

_Anzu: goodnight :-)_

Yes, he wishes.

In time he’ll find rest, but it’s just so hard to think of anything but nothing whilst asphyxiating in a tomb of blanket plush, ones stripped and remade by housekeeping each morning that he leaves. That isn’t how it is at home, his or any other. Familiarity would be perhaps the only thing to keep him sane here.

Though home, at the mention, lacks one thing he does enjoy about the city; he rises, plucking himself yonderly from his sheets to make toward the broad side windows. As the curtains pull astray, he’s welcomed not by night but by _life,_ a million little lights tinkering in the streets and buildings surrounding. He thinks he’d ought to keep the curtains parted to help him sleep. He thinks he ought to pinch the window open and feel the world’s breeze.

(Weather does not stay still, weather is a vagabond, something Malik takes comfort in to know that this wind licking the tips of his hair and staining his cheeks could very well be the same that, some time ago, led his sister to step back inside for a coat).

When he’d first arrived, the windows in his room were inoperable. That’d changed as soon as he’d planted both feet on the sill and investigated the bearings. Trick screws. They’d curled their way out the next morning after a jaunt for a hardware store, resting now with their mother of a screwdriver upon the side table. Malik leans his folded arm to the window base, leaning so far out as to feel his heartbeat against the wood trim, and breathes.

Every so often, a microscopic body will catch his eye thirteen stories down. Somewhere he ponders why anyone would like to be out along the street nearing midnight. Then, he glances, drinks in the glory of golden light braying off neighboring windows, absorbs the sound of passing cars just to know someone else exists alongside him, perhaps understands where a love for the night could stem. The air is cool enough to chap his lip.

Once he’d gotten the window to bend to his will, the morning sunlight had baked against his bare arms and chest and chin tipped back, and he’d breathed in that moment the same way he does this one- he isn’t the type of person who will allow himself to feel _stuck,_ and if he ever should feel _stuck,_  trapped inside the coffin of four air tight walls, then he’s the type of person to fix it. Outdoor oxygen sapped straight from the tree bark, that’s his drug. Sometimes, if he’s nothing else to do, Malik likes to hang himself so far out the window that a sudden _slam_ should send him toppling right out it. In those moments, he can think of nothing but his breathing, eyes closed and hair a mess across his plain face, and he’s weightless there, clinging to the brick outside of the hotel wall. He’s flying. He’s liberated. Malik likes to ponder on what it would be like if he ever fell down to that thin strip of pavement supporting the building he dangles from. Then he wonders the same of a conscious leap. He wonders which would hurt his siblings more to hear the news of.

More likely, most of all, they needn’t hear of it at all to feel a sting come behind both eyes, only to know of him as he dresses himself the next afternoon once he’s less than alive again. Arms catch through the sleeves of a skimpy top, eyeing in the darkened television reflection the bruises on his clavicles before deciding on the jacket he pulls over it. Two shoes, two steps, pockets full and ready as he isn’t.

The address he’d been texted this time- one that hadn’t come preplanned, he clicks his teeth to think -borders unknown territory, but if he’s learned anything the past few months, it’s that the sidewalks here lead back to a journey’s start with enough loops around, so he’ll never be lost. Not more so than he’s been all his life. He takes to the jaunt, going over the destination in his head at every new street sign, until the two names match and all that’s left is squinting toward every last building number. He assumes not that such a luxury porch step as the one he finds could be correct, yet he’d rather slip inside to gunfire than question his boss’ instructions, so he steels himself, walks mildly, stiffly, up toward the apartment complex. The elevator spits him out at the base of the third floor. It isn’t dirty as his normal jobs, not a speck of crackling paint, not a single carpet thread uptorn. There’s paintings here, blotchy landscapes by artists with names he can’t pronounce, white sculpted rails for the staircase, corner plants, golden numbers hooked on every door. Finding the pair marking 3B slap his stomach wetly, but he’s a pony that’s been led around a thousand different shows, blue ribbons that don’t earn themselves off being shy.

He rings the bell. Hands lay back to jacket pockets.

They clench tandemly just as soon as the door thrusts open ahead of him, and pardon him for noticing her breasts before anything else, but it occurs to him that no one’s told her her bathrobe has a belt to cinch it shut.

“Malik?” clicks through her grinning teeth, pencil brows lifted. From the first glance, he’s disinterested in her. Blonde hair flows crimped over two thin shoulders. An hourglass forms her waist, hands pristinely primped, lipstick such a vanity crimson he’s certain she owns pearls somewhere in that apartment. He’s never loved rich people so much as he’s loved the idea of being one.

Once he’s nodded, the woman claims him by an elbow to drag inside behind the latching door. No matter what sort of job he takes, he’s sure to assess in immediacy several things; one being the exits, another being his reasons not to be afraid. This woman stands five-four and has lace on her panties. There’s a framed photograph of a young child on the mantle. He’ll be fine.

“I’m so glad you could make it,” the woman says to him. On the marble countertop of the joining kitchen, a wineglass sits with a lipstick stain around the rim. Nothing to fear. She prances over toward his stance on her plush den carpeting. A hand extends at such an angle to slide her robe’s sleeve to an elbow and expose an array of silver bracelets. As she shakes his hand, gingerly, she tells him, “Call me Liz, honey. And don’t worry, my husband’s at work and my mother’s got the kid. This will be our little secret.”

How thoughtful of her. Malik nods, and _smiles,_  because he’d rather not have this all be for null if his client decides her hooker’s got a sour attitude and sends him away. He allows himself be led toward a door in the back that reveals itself as a bedroom. Picturesque, that’s the word he comes up with to describe the whole place. As if he were walking through a furniture store, and they’d set it up so evilly that anyone could imagine their own lives playing out along the thousand dollar armchairs and coffee table coasters. Everything feels clinical to him, everything up to the point of being pushed onto the comforter with teeth on his zipper. That bit isn’t clinical. It’s routine.

Reverse plays on the tape after a good fifteen minutes of watching himself fuck a bottle blonde midlife crisis into her expensive mattress. He’s standing again, clothing back on, glancing at the way she clutches her chest as it heaves in the minutes following the rendezvous. She sits up, shaking her hair out from its tattered state (and in his defense, she did beg him to pull it). “Wow…” breathes her smile, exhilarated, as if she’s no bearings at all until clearing her throat and moving closer toward the nightstand. A drawer pulls open. “Three hundred, right?”

Malik nods. He watches her count pocket change out from a folded wad, fifteen twenties that grace their fingertips together a lingering moment.

“You were amazing, Marik,” the woman calls after him, his eyes too tired to care to correct her. That accent may as well be another language to him, anyway. “I’m gonna tell all my girlfriends about you. And maybe you’ll be seeing me again soon, too, mhmh.”

The apartment door closes hard behind his shoulders.

He counts the money an extra time before it’s pocketed, trading the thick cut of his wallet for his cell phone this time. _First Floor_ has just highlighted itself on the elevator buttons when he gags on his own corneas.

Three:forty two. PM.

He could swear to every God he’d left home at two, though it’d been a freshly awakened by text notif two o’clock and a curt _Get_ _there_ through his mind that had driven him. Could he have truly wasted so much time? Blood pulses in his ears.

Anzu.

He’s dialing her before he’s fully pushed his way into the dwindling sun. Yes, the grid system and the looping, but he’d sooner find his way to Brazil from here than his hotel room. Dial tone stings him, standing like a pole on the sidewalk corner, whipping eyes left and right to determine his best bet placed.

Abruptly, the ringing ends. He doesn’t let her voice greet him first. “Anzu-”

_“I know, I know,”_ she’s determined to speak over him. He’d fight back were it not for the frenetic edge tangible in her tone. _“I’m so, so, so,_ so _sorry I stood you up. It was just- I really lost track of time, and these girls invited me for coffee after class earlier, and everything got so mixed up in my mind, I just- I’m so sorry, let’s plan something for tomorrow, okay? I don’t have class_ or _practice. I’m all yours.”_

All his. Malik blinks his lashes against the breeze.

“...It’s alright,” he says, swallowing tightly. “I was just calling to make sure you were okay, it isn’t like you to leave someone waiting for forty five minutes.”

_“I know. I’m sorry. Lunch tomorrow?”_

He wets his tongue to allow himself speak. Details exchange a numb minute up to dropping the call into his pocket again. Two hands grip his coat. Penitence burns up through his airways.

Walking home takes him a goddamned hour, and if he knew where he wasn’t going, he’d’ve gone the right direction.

But it doesn’t quite matter. Because she hadn’t sounded so frantic as she had...exhausted, and frankly, he must relate.

Thirteen floors up, he splits today’s pay into three sections; spending, which sits in his wallet, savings in the corner of a dresser drawer, and the thirty percent he knows will be hunted down sooner than later. He slaps that to the table, and looks at it again not once.

Another hour, or perhaps minute, second, day or year. Time plays rising shores when the window sill aches dull to ribs.

This time, he wonders how long it would take before he stopped feeling the fall.

* * *

“I love it here. The ocean is so much different than back home.”

By differing definition, he agrees. The very first time he’d seen the light reflecting off the coast of Damietta, he’d been twelve or thirteen, one of his earliest memories of the world outside their house. That night had been one of Ishizu’s desperate attempts at clinging to the brother she knew was trapped behind the plexiglass chamber of antipathy. Malik had been all but dragged at the wrist down toward the shoreline, though watching it there, the serenity of the water stinging with late evening heat, the way it existed in life this way, had shimmered the reflection of his eyes in love. He’d halfway listened to her describe how the Nile flows out this way, into the vast Mediterranean. The beauty of it had tightened Malik’s chest, then all at once, the memory halts short at the thought of missing such an intense artistry all those years imprisoned inside. Perhaps he’d asked Ishizu what’d happened the next morning, and perhaps she’d worn agony in that smile that told him not to worry about it.

“Yeah,” Malik says, not watching the water before them but rather in his mind, and even if he’s caught from his stupor, he still cannot focus on that ocean when such a sight as Anzu in a two piece swimsuit and white lace shawl stands ahead of him. Sudden, striking, she turns on one shoulder, sunhat caught in a hand as the wind decides to pick up, peering at him with a smirk enough to stripe his face in heat.

They’d chosen a spot for lunch together, walked to the little bistro side by side right up to searing in the sight of the line trailing out the front door. Glances had traded each other. Anzu had all but ran back up to her apartment, emerging downstairs again in her gorgeous splash of beach attire just after Malik had caught his breath.

The sand burns deliciously the bare skin of his feet. He’s walking to her, he knows that much, leaving behind the post of guarding her tote and towel to approach her at the shoreline. Breeze billows her hair, the white ribbon adorning the hat she keeps sternly a hold on. She’s a painting in shades of red, cherry lips and a deep maroon to color the shadows between her feet that do not show in the ankle high water, where Malik reaches out, but she’s all laughter to taunt him closer. An inhale finds him. Once he’s unbent himself, the cuffs of his pants have been rolled to the knee, trekking toward her as those blue eyes beckon.

“Just take them off,” she laughs once they’re beside each other. Fingers pinch at the front of his half cut shirt. “C’mon, come swimming with me.”

“Ah.” He’d give her anything, he’d realized in his sleep one night, yet there’s a groove in his lip that must be bitten now, a nick of blood that follows a razor slice. “I don’t want to take my shirt off.”

Anzu’s head tilts, lifts back straight again to nod him valid. “Oh, right… That’s okay. We can just walk.” Before he’s to free her like a dove from both hands, she’s slipping their elbows interlocked, using a second hand to keep the loose ends of her wrap from tracing the water’s edge. Malik thinks she must have been handcrafted by God to be a dancer, for her every last movement down to the tendons breathes with elegance.

“You had a good idea to come here today,” he tells her, the emperor who guides his lover throughout the halls. Everyone else strewn around the sand and shore are meer onlookers to them. Royalty, just what he’s always craved. But he digresses. “The weather is beautiful.”

“I love summertime,” she agrees, lifting a hand to peer toward the glaring sky. She draws back to focus only once he says, “Because of your birthday?”

Her staring makes him think to pause, which he does, there against the idly lapping tides on his shins, to frame an almost guilted expression toward hers of endless wonder.

“Um…” _Well, go on, Malik._ Instead, his mouth hangs dumbly.

At the eventual scorch of something _awkward,_ she shakes her head down toward the water. “Sorry. I was just thinking.” Their steps fall into sync again. He does not have to prod, as the rest peels in awful tire. “If I asked Rory when my birthday was, he’d probably guess sometime in January.”

He thinks he’s more shocked that the water is blue.

In the quick lapse up in her apartment to change, Anzu had had motherhood on the mind in packing a bag of two towels. The first lays between his knees and the sand. He watches her flag the second one in the air, the lift of her arms so toned and merciful, the way that lift flexes her chest and ribs out so broadly. Malik’s imagination draws up the picture of his hand reaching out, grasping her in one single fist around that tiny waist of hers. She could be his doll, and his heart, the Lilliputian house so ornate in all its furnishings. He’d keep her safe in there.

For a moment, she looks as though she’s to say something, his attention perking for it, but he finds only the tuck of her lips back closed, placed there on the second towel in hush. A pounce is her motion to lay backward, limbs splayed to four points, skin dusty with sun and sand. Her hat finishes the look by dropping to cover the whole of her face.

Tentative, he watches her lie there a while, leans over on a leg to pinch fingers upon the brim of the hat. It pulls back to shroud her face in light. On instant, she’s laughing.

“I could stay out here for hours…” Malik watches her right down to the necklace pendant on its chain swaying forward with the lift of her body. Knees hug against her chest, wistful stare pointed toward the horizon. She’s in view, there, from the pristinity of her hands to the chipped pink polish on all ten toes. He knows he’s hit the lottery to see her this way, to hear her voice melt like honeysuckle upon his flesh. “Have you ever seen something so beautiful, it sort of just...mesmerizes you?”

And without hesitation, he tells her, “You.”

Time breaks apart quietly, not quite a sonic boom, rather a snap of two pieces from each other caused by the way she looks at him. And laughs.

“Oh, shut up,” snorts her bemusement. Fingers reach out to bat him on one strong shoulder, move to tuck a lock of hair and rest back on her knee afterward. “I’m talking about _real_ beauty, something so raw and incredible that...that you feel like you just lose all your breath when you see it. Something you wouldn’t think you’d miss, but then once it’s gone, you feel...different.”

The pendant on her chest catches the light enough to blind him. When Malik next opens his eyes, he’s still looking at Anzu, but there’s no sand beneath them nor ocean to adore; swimwear has been traded for shorts too small and tee too big, kneeling on her bed with a pillow in her lap and a smile in her voice.

At first, and midst, and very very close to the current moment, if he’s honest- he’d been hesitant to even step foot inside her bedroom, even once prompted. He recognizes the tie dyed blanket he’d slept with folded up on the end of her bed, the rest of it covered by a lush pink comforter he’s timid to sit upon. Malik isn’t quite sure what’s happened to the Malik Ishtar who’d thought himself king of the new world, for he certainly cannot be the same soul who's too shy to have a seat on someone else’s mattress. Once he does, it is softly, with no pressure from the room’s owner as she talks on about something he’s half listening to. There’s a poster on the wall beside what can only be a closet door, a photograph of a woman midway through a leap across stage. The sharpie marker signature in one corner tells him it’s her pride and joy.

A vanity behind him sits covered across its surface with cosmetics. Makeups and perfumes. A plastic tray of false eyelashes. Over its mirror, obscuring his reflection to half the size, a men’s flannel is slung, and Malik decides he’s done looking around for now.

“Are you hungry? I can make you something,” she offers. He blinks as though it’s the most inane idea he’s ever heard, to be waited on by her, and wonders again how he ever thought he’d govern anything. His hand waves the question away. She points a strict finger. “Okay, but make sure you eat something soon. And drink plenty of water. We were out in the sun for hours.”

“I know, I know,” he just about laughs, leaning more toward the way she moves. “My body is used to the heat.”

“Oh, yeah, that’s right.” Her face rests pouty in both palms. “You’re lucky. I’d love to live somewhere as beautiful as Egypt. Or even just visit again. Have you ever been to Giza? The pyramids there are amazing.”

Malik turns toward her.

His strength defies him in a hard gasping laugh.

“What? What did I say?” Concern spins in her eyes. “Did I pronounce it wrong, or something?”

Demanding the twitch away from his lips, Malik wets them, smiling toward her, just her. “Have you ever been to Tokyo?”

Anzu squints, blinking confusion out of her way. “Wh… Of course, I’ve been a million times. I lived in Japan all my life.”

“There’s your answer, then,” he says back, to which she’s turned a huffing mess that lifts one arm akimbo.

“I’m just curious about your life,” she bites, what turns to a stupid smile as she quips, “Jerk.”

Across the room, the open window splits them from the world by only a thin screen. Curtains, delicate white lace, rustle inside. Malik edges closer to it and in tandem to her, so deep now on the bed that his heels lift from the rug. Cautious still. But comfortably so.

“Anzu,” he says. It’s perhaps been some time, if he’s accurate in thinking he’s watched the curtains blow back and forth over a dozen sways now. “I’d like to ask you something.”

How accurate to say- he’d like to ask her about a thousand somethings, and he hadn’t quite yet decided on which one shall be first before the opening statement had caught her eye. She nods him on. The open window with its fresh summer air has gone to his head.

“Well,” he taps. His toes still touch the floor, he makes certain of that much. Sunlight forms a halo on the floor. Malik breathes not from his chest but deep within the divots of his back. “What made you pick New York?”

He can _feel_ his courage deflating like needle pricked cellophane. It’s innocuous enough, that’s all he cares to think, and just perhaps if he stays on the right path, he’ll be led to his more carmine desires.

Anzu fidgets with the bracelet at one wrist. She’s thinking, Malik can tell, all the way up to her head tipping righted. “I knew I wanted to go to America since I was little. After saving up and preparing myself for a _long_ time, I finally had the opportunity after high school. New York happened because, well, Juilliard happened.” She tugs at the black beading of the bracelet, never meeting his eye. “I wasn’t really sure if I wanted to stay here or not. But then I got more comfortable, I loved all my classes, I met some new friends. And I met Rory. He was such a nice guy.”

Though he hesitates, the dreamy look on her face prompts him to push, “Past tense?”

Between them, were there a table, yes, it’d be turned over, from the way she looks at him in a hint of humored surprise. Her head shakes a light note. “He’s still a good guy. I’m sorry about the other night. I’m sure you heard most of that…”

He’d like to tell her no, save her from the embarrassment he can see brewing up beneath her eyes. And something compels him to do just that, a little shake of his head, though something twice as strong draws his fingers to tighten together. “It’s alright. I...I only heard one thing.” Tender skin of cheek breaks off against his incisors. “I’ve been thinking about it, actually. Um- Do...do you think I’m gay..?”

The flush threatening her cheekbones before is dazzling now. She blinks, mouth a low line. “Uh… Aren’t you?”

Probably. No matter how open the window sits, there’ll never be enough space in there for the both of them to fit.

Malik shrugs one shoulder. “...I don’t know. I never thought so.”

Anzu looks as though she’d just fall forward and die should his eyes find her, and to her sanctity he’s of a similar shade, staring instead for the far wall. This isn’t quite the path he’d foreseen. He bites down against that cheek. Hard.

“Well…” He hears her mouth wet itself, and something else, something soft, the audacity of fabric to shift higher. Curiosity gets the better of him to glance toward it, the scene of Anzu’s shirt lifted up below her chin the sunshine that blossoms scarlet across his face.

Her breasts rest there, exposed to him. Him. Malik turns closer, almost in awe, almost in craze, supporting himself on the lean of two arms whilst his pupils dilate to examine the full picture.

Before he’s quite finished, it vanishes.

“You don’t like girls,” she assures him as her shirt pulls back into place. “If I had done that to Yuugi or Jounouchi, they’d be in an ambulance.”

Malik’s features tense. The gold of his jewelry glisters when he shifts. “I think I’m just too used to it.”

“Used to it?” Smirking, she leans to push him by the bicep. “I had no idea you were such a dog, Malik.” Sunlight still bleeds inside. His rolled eyed shrug continues her, “Sorry if I assumed anything. I’ve just never seen a straight guy be so… _pretty._ But be whoever you want to. I’m certainly no one to judge.”

He stares at her, almost as if he doesn’t believe her to exist there before him or anywhere at all.

“Anzu,” he says, and upon that same breath, a finger lifts, tucks back in place a strand of fallen brunette. “...Can I have some water?”

To that touch that lingers by her ear, she grasps her own, hand half the size, snorting into a hang of the head. “Sure,” she tells him, still in laughter that he contracts at the mouth as well. “Let’s go to the kitchen.”

He stands, poised to go forth before thinking better of it. Leading the way in a house not his own seems improper. Instead he waits, allows her past him once she’s smoothed her bedding out after them, walking past with a tipped smile his way.

“I’ve really had fun today,” she comments while one hand pulls the door open for them. “I kinda wish my other friends were as easygoing as you. Everybody thinks you have to spend money to have a good time. I never lived like that growing up, if I told my mom I was bored, she’d point to the backyard. I remember I- Oh!”

One step past the threshold, she’s already frozen. He pauses just quick enough to keep them from colliding. And in good time- “Hi, Rory. I didn’t hear you come in.”

Malik chews his own teeth.

Ahead of them, the living room is quiet with the obvious newcomer, clothes and hands still tattered with what shines like motor oil in the light behind him. A hardworking man, that’s all Malik can make out, a hardworking man come home to find him in his girlfriend’s bed.

In a mirrored world, Malik would be happy whatever lover he had was so friendly.

In this one, Rory leers him down, a handspan taller in the workboots he slowly lifts himself from as he glances them both down.

“Hey,” he says, nonchalant, fine. Beside the front door, he kicks the shoes off, wrings his arms out before him to drain their tension. A hard breath leaves him. Malik thinks of the exits and reasons he has no fear.

“How was work?” Everything to Anzu is a perfect picture, with how she goes on her way forward toward the kitchen, beckoning Malik along as he stumbles to follow. The rooms are a warm page of color. He stays his distance from the both of them, perching himself at the strip betwixt carpet and tile.

“Was good,” answers behind him. That stare is not met until it is begged to be. “Hey, Mal. You look lost. C’mere, have a seat.”

With its two cushions, the couch had been a nightmare to attempt sleep upon, yet it’d been tenfold more comfortable that night than now as he steps toward it, plucking his tail out from between the thighs to sit down beside the second man. Rory waves the television remote. Malik flinches.

“You like the Yankees?”

Retracting from the wince, he intakes the question a moment before deciding that whatever it means, his safest bet is to nod. There’s silence that follows that, a broad smile he doesn’t revere whilst across the television screen displays a field of baseball players.

“Hey, baby,” he leans leftward to shout out. “Why don’t you get us some drinks while we watch the game, huh?”

It takes only a moment for Anzu’s interrogating gaze to peek from the kitchen. “And when did you become my 1950’s husband?”

“C’mon, baby,” laughs Rory, placing one wide hand upon Malik’s closest knee. “What’s male bonding without a couple beers?”

Staring so intently at the hand upon him, he’s startled, almost, once it lifts away to instead accept the cold condensation of a bottle handed his way. Another proffers toward Malik until Anzu’s gasp cuts it off, shaking her head to herself. “That’s right, you said you don’t drink. I’m sorry, let me get you-”

“It’s fine,” he insists, meeting her flared eyes as the bottle finds his reach. “Thank you.”

Though that look scrutinizes him, she’s distracted enough by the hand tugging her downward that he seems a distant worry. Her ass finds a lap beneath it. Steam ripples from the twisted top of the bottle. Malik’s own stays clutched between his knees.

For a while, it’s normal- everything. From time to time one of the men on screen will catch a ball in his wide leather mitt, or miss it when it’s thrown toward his bat, and Rory will beat a hand to his thigh while muttering something dirty about the “Goddamn Sox.” Ishizu and Rishid were never big on televised sports, making him not so much, either. He can’t locate the appeal in watching other men run around just to be angry with them over it. Malik’s just too hands on for that.

“Come on, let me up,” catches his attention from the screen to the couple beside him. Anzu struggles within the arms clasping her waist. “Unless you want me to pee in your lap.”

Kisses battle with the side of her neck a short moment, he at last releasing her to stand up with mirroring smirks to each other (Anzu’s, though, vanishes as quickly as she turns her head toward the bathroom, he notices).

“She’s a cutie,” Rory sings after the bathroom door latches audibly shut. He’s a robot in those motions of his, the ones of turning the jaw to one side and eyeing Malik down the length of his nose. “Don’t you think so?”

That’s a trap card of a question if he’s ever heard one. _No, she isn’t,_ and then he’s thrown on the street for such unheard of insolence. _Yes, she’s the most ethereal being I’ve yet to meet,_ and he’s missing teeth.

“She’s nice,” Malik says mildly. “A good friend.”

An empty bottle sits on the coffee table and a full one in his hands. He watches, or _tries_ to, the game on the screen. The camera pans around to a close up of the man at bat.

“Yeah,” smokes the voice of the other man. “A little too good.”

Sunlight. Window panes, reflecting the afternoon in a prism. It’s lovely, it’s all lovely.

The bottle drops to the carpet with a dull thump, too focused on the new grip of fingers owning space within the back of his hair.

Sunlight. Blindingly white.


	5. Chapter 5

His regular Thursday client asks him where he got the shiner. When he perks a half shot of confusion, she clears her throat, proudly proclaiming in the rusty Arabic she continues to say she’s learning for him, “Who gave you the black eye?”

“Oh,” he breathes, wincing at his own attempt to blink. “Long story.”

She stares back at him, nonplussed at the match of language. Malik sighs, and goes to unbutton his pants.

The remainder of the day sits ahead of him. A good portion of it finds him seated in his room’s armchair, feet on the floor, eyes glazed over against the wall. The left one stays pinched shut by the swollen bruise of a cheekbone he’s accumulated.

It isn’t anything very new to him, not in childhood life with his father nor since he’s found himself here, perhaps the rationale behind spending the last stretch of the day with his cheek flat to the table beside a plate of half cold room service.

He wonders what he’s doing here. And he wonders again once he’s asked it.

“Your turn,” says Anzu against the breeze of the evening. Last he’d seen her, it’d been watching her thighs as she left for the bathroom, thinking of her as he stumbled blindly down the two rows of apartment stairs and out into the world alone. She’d known naught of his souvenir for visiting her that day, but it’s nothing six days and liquid foundation cannot heal. “What brought _you_ to New York?”

Today, her sundress is a pale green that floats just above the knee. He knows the number of bows on the back, and he knows the number of times it’s hit against her left thigh as they walk.

“Work,” he answers. Water ripples in his ears upon an approach toward a fountain large enough to steal the attention of the whole block. They’d walked past a pond of miniature sailboats earlier, lingering mostly about the stark green of summer grass. Talking. Spiraling hands just _that_ close to each other.

“Which is?” Her lips are the glossiest pink he’s seen them. They curve to him, just to him, and he supposes he doesn’t have to hide himself from her as he’s been.

“Stockbroker.” But he does. It’s easier. He’d hate to see a swan with a broken neck.

When Anzu nods to him, the nerves in his stomach twist together to shun him for picking an occupation he’s only heard of when passing by news channels. Should she ask, he’ll sweat, but rather she’s the lily of the valley that blooms under his nose, and she cares even less about that type of yuppie shit than he does. “I’m sure you could find an apartment for rent around here somewhere. If you’re planning to live here for a while, a hotel isn’t your best option.”

“Right,” he nods, “but it’s-”

“Expensive,” comes the finish, hissing into a wince. “I know. Even with my rent and tuition paid, I’m still barely making it. Utilities and groceries and all that other stuff. _Uck_ , who ever agreed to make existing cost so much?”

“Do you work?” he so stupidly asks.

Anzu tilts her gaze toward the fountain. It ripples the same as it always has. “No, not really. I know I should be, but thinking about spending two hours at practice, four more in class, and then having to go to work on top of it all…no, thank you.”

“I understand,” he nods, stepping through the delicacy of the topic like thorns curling up both ankles. They walk, and she sighs, and he’d like to match his other eye the same shade of contusion for speaking out so bluntly that way.

“I’ll have to eventually. I guess I can’t rely on my boyfriend forever.” In the sunlight, her expression sours. “Not that he minds having something to hold over my head when he’s drunk enough…”

In line, they trail the short stairs up toward the fountain, the park’s main attraction based on the amount of shirtless tanners and skateboarding teens looping around the pavement. Malik stares down toward his reflection in the water. It blinks when he does. It waves back to him.

Beside him, Anzu giggles into a curled finger, alerts him to look up when a hand brushes his. “Here. Make a wish.”

He ignores the split second where he’d expected there to be a birthday candle in her hand and accepts the penny she offers. The pair to it holds tight within her hands, ones that come to rest at her chest, eyes closed, body weightless.

Such tenacity makes him feel a little dull for a simple toss into the water with the silent plea for Mazaki Anzu to find peace in life. But he supposes it’ll suffice well enough.

When another _splosh_ flicks droplets up off the surface, he looks to her, watches with his own eyes how her beam melts from her face with each passing second of inaction.

“It’s a secret, right?” Malik murmurs. Water hushes respectfully from the statue at the fountain’s center. “You can’t tell me what you wished for?”

With the sunset behind her, Anzu returns to smiling, dropping a wink for her only response.

Central Park bids goodnight to them. It’d been a perfect day to spend this way, walking well past the point of aching calves and not thinking of it in the slightest. Not when he’s with her. Only once she’s traipsed up her apartment stairs and he’s woven his way into clutching the subway handle does he think he’d trade a decade of life for a seat right this second.

Fortunately, on his second trip that night, he’s able to fit himself along one bench side, back leant to the window and grip tight upon the zip of his coat. The night isn’t as young as he’d like, though it isn’t an issue for his soul to bear in the moment, only slipping himself through the front door of a tall Manhattan apartment complex, recalling in pure hope the correct number of which the mailbox label corresponds.

His third trip that night is a tired lean onto his own lap, grateful to no longer have to guard with his life the loose pile of cash previously stowed in a breast pocket.

Malik lays on his right side again that night.

When both eyes whip open some hours later, clouded by blear and ache, he’s no longer on that side but rather bolted upright at the sound of alarm. The blankets crimp within his grasp, preparing himself to flee fore the roar of flame or crime shall emerge, yet all at once he’s stricken by the realization of solitude. Less widespread alarm, more so the blaring chime private upon his bedside table.

His heart relaxes as he’s fumbling for the phone to answer it, catching vaguely the time betwixt three and four of the morning. The curtains are drawn on either side of the window. Breeze flickers the edge of the sheets.

“... _Hullo,”_ his heavy tongue presents. So quickly it occurs to him that he hasn’t checked the caller ID, though just as he’s dragging the phone to do so, a jarring crack of noise pulls him back, an exhale that leaves behind what feels the past millennia.

 _“Malik,”_ is all that must be heard for him to know his sister has been crying.

Darkness surrounds his whisk of the blankets off his legs. They lift him right off the bed, just to pace toward a wall, to crawl back to point A without ever a noise outside his clenching fingers and widened eyes.

A cough rattles deep from the chest. Malik covers a palm across his mouth, swallows, blanks, pulls the hand back away. And the first thing he thinks to say, in his thrown from sleep state, his last months buried away beneath heartache state- “I’m sorry.”

On the other end, there’s sniffing, a weighted roll of breaths that draw him to sit at his bed’s edge, listening. _“Don’t apologize until I know that you’re alright. Kaiba has just told me you’re in America, what were you thinking, brother? What have you been doing so long on your own?”_

“It’s...it’s a lot to explain,” he gnaws. Across the street, a light flicks off in a stranger’s porcelain washroom. Malik shakes his head, eyes shut to the ceiling. “I’m alright, I promise. I’m here on my own free will, and I’ve been just fine.”

 _“Rishid and I have hardly slept a night since you left,”_ feels as though a palm stuffing his face beneath the ocean surface. _“Come home, Malik, before I must go get you myself.”_

“Sister, listen to me, _please.”_ His arm grips across his abdomen, leaning forward til bangs brush kneecaps. Perhaps his lids should split open from the pressure they’re squeezed in. “I’m doing fine, I have been all along. I need my freedom. I want to see the world.”

She does not respond. Both ears ring with the quiet.

“Please,” he repeats.

There sounds a shifting, perhaps a lift of her head or eyes or heart. _“Fine, Malik. But I’d better hear from you from now on. Do not ever do that to me again, you have no idea how sick I’ve been over you.”_

“I know,” shakes his guilty self. “I’m sorry, sister. I promise I’ll contact both you and Rishid whenever I can. You have my word.” His fingers do not tremble so awfully as his lungs, though piece by piece he connects himself together again all the way up to the brain intact. He blinks in the moonlight that pools against his honey gold skin. Clench. Relax. Malik blows an exhale. The curtains tapdance against the wind. “...I just need to ask one favor of you.”


	6. Chapter 6

He knows he’s early. He knows it by the car on the curb that he stakes out for half an hour until he hears its engine rev off into the morning.

That saves a spot for him to pull up into, and wait some more.

It’s worth it, for certain, after it’s been not yet one hour while feeling three, glancing up to the front steps of the apartment where the door gently swings. Mouth poised as he is, he’s a flawless devil dancing there just off the sidewalk, her prince upon a chariot.

Only the most careless of him is it to look up again and notice his princess does not fit so fairly who he’d expected.

The woman, a perfect stranger, blinks at him once she catches his leering, adjusts her purse strap high against her chest to duck her head forward down the sidewalk between them. Malik bites the tip of a thumb.

Three knocks. He pauses. Three more knocks, louder this time, with feeling.

Before him, the door forgets to sunder him any longer from desire, allowing the light to fall against Anzu’s tired face. “Malik..? What’s the matter?”

Fingertips scratch the roots of his hair.

“You...have dance practice at nine.” _Alright...keep going…_ He psyches himself down and out standing there in the second floor hall, peering behind her to the empty apartment and feeling his left cheek throb at his fondest memories. “I can drive you. If you want.”

Anzu stares at him. She keeps her hand upon the doorknob, leaning her weight against the other arm that curls to the wood frame.

“I don’t have practice today. It’s...Friday.” The last bit comes out in a wide yawn. Anzu sniffs, looking to him from only one eye. “You came all the way here just to give me a ride?”

Silence is answer enough for all her intuition. A single push draws her body straightened, laughing behind a palm not slightly at his expense, he knows.

“Well, I don’t wanna waste your gas. Let’s go somewhere. Breakfast?”

He blinks at her. The next he knows, he’s led down the stairs by his thudding chest ahead. For all he knows, for how little it seems he’s thought this over, he worries now of her rejection.

They reach the pavement outside in a set of skips. Just as soon as she sees it, he can tell, because he’s never seen her eyes glint quite so large. “Is that your motorcycle?”

Malik steps ahead of her. One finger flicks the keys from his pocket, twisting one into the lock on the very back. The seat flips up. His hands reach within to pull out the hot pink orb of a helmet, the first one of black wedged neath one arm, to hold between them.

“Yes.” He pushes the second helmet toward her. Its price tag belongs to the wind now, having spent a good quarter of his initial waiting time peeling an index nail against the sticker. Anzu blinks at it. Malik wets his lips.

Arms have never felt so delectable hooked around his waist as hers do.

“That felt _crazy,_ ” rushes out of her against the safety of the parking lot pavement. When she stumbles, he’s closer than right there, catching her wrist to keep her out of the line of hedges behind them. Anzu shakes her hair to either side, fingers roaming the mess of bangs at her forehead to smooth it back. Exhilaration dances through her. “Where’d you even get this thing? You disappear for a few days, and suddenly you’re a biker?”

Were Malik more of a gentleman, he wouldn’t notice the way her words allude to his glory, his presence within her life that goes missed should it falter. He hides a quiver of lips in tucking the helmets into the seat compartment. Vague, idle, she wanders toward the diner they’ve parked at.

“I’ve owned it for a few years, actually. Since I first got my license.” His steps clack to catch up with her. Along the chiseled acres of his torso, the sunlight gleams, shirt as tiny and loose as he aspires to be. “My sister made arrangements with Kaiba to have it transported here for me.”

Ahead of him, she pulls the glass front door open for him to first walk through. “Oh, so you did talk to Ishizu? That’s great to hear. I hope she’s doing well…”

He struts through the doorway like a vampire sans invitation. Heat cascades just as soon as he has, air thick as sin within the little establishment lacking open windows. Anzu steps up behind him, sniffing around them before she proclaims, “Mmm. Smells like bacon.”

Though his stomach churns at the notion, he’s kind in leading them toward a booth to sit at. It’s very familiar to him, the way they angle themselves with eyes locked, cut only by her grasping of the single section menu they’re meant to share.

“I’ve never been here before,” Anzu murmurs, only looking toward where her finger highlights, “but I trust crepes from anywhere.”

Tucking a strand back, Malik nods to it. He’d spent a minute this morning perfecting the sharp edges of his eyeliner, admiring the gleam of the glitter he’d traced the curve of his nose with. Yes, he’s pretty. So what? Grow up. He rests his chin on the fold of knuckles, watching her thoughts roam behind her forehead.

“About my sister,” he murmurs, drawing back around to where they’d begun before. Several other booths fill with couples and families along the glass walls. Waitresses bustle about, aprons taut to full hips. “She’s doing alright. Much better since she’s heard from me. I think she’d probably like to visit sometime.”

“Ah, that would be great.” Her smile blinks pure ivory. “Don’t forget to stay in touch with her. You’re lucky Kaiba didn’t slash your tires before shipping the bike out here.”

Most certainly. He glances up to her sidelong, drinking in the richness of all that she is. Mazaki Anzu reminds him sometimes of the mother he never had, and at other times of something sinister begging him back to its murk. Not to say that she brings out the worst in him, but he’ll find himself walking beside her and dreaming of a throne built of pyramid stone awaiting him, thinks how full a life it would be to watch beggars kiss his queen’s feet. Again, not to _say,_ that he’d envision each other with rings on the fingers, though she’s charming enough a fruit to bite into in all of these times spent together. He doesn’t love her, doesn’t want to. She’s something familiar to hold onto whilst the water crashes mercilessly against his knees. There, too, he must point out, is not bringing out his worst but rather bringing out his _worse,_ the feeble heart he’s got that shan’t imagine damaging a centimeter of soil. Anzu brings out his worst when she’s said, dropped loudly down the breakfast menu after four minutes of silence, that she can’t stop thinking about the drive over here; Anzu brings out his worst when a casual suggestion brings them to their feet, a ten slipped under the condensation of a water glass just for the troubles, and they’re sprinting off through the parking lot in grins to slide themselves back among the rugged chapping wind of the morning. His hands twist knots around the handlebars, flying fifty in a thirty and pulsing all over to know that one short stop is all it would take. Malik weaves around a Jeep coasting ahead of them, practically parallel to the asphalt, feeling the grip around his middle squeeze as though tomorrow knows them not. But she never once asks him to slow down.

Anzu brings out his worst in some cases, but Malik’s always thought just in the back of his mind that his worst is rather charming.

Pure euphoria blinds him. _This._ This is it.

And then, all together, a sweep of God’s hand, it’s over as he careens forward toward the curb of her apartment. He knows she’s seen it, even without lifting her helmet visor, because it’s all he can look at now, that dingy silver car parked ahead of them.

“It’s fine,” says Anzu’s rise. Lifting the helmet off, her hair pours out like rose petals atop breeze, followed by the return of it to the driver. “I’ll tell him I went for a run.”

Hesitation at last allows him to nod. He cannot quite discern when the break had occurred between _he’s just a friend_ and rather hiding away their moments spent in secret. Once he’s replaced himself on the seat, he watches her go, every step that clicks up toward the front entry door. Her departure leaves him only with the option to squint high at the sun, a hand above the eyes as he scours every window. The second floor isn’t hard to make out from his view. Neither is the wide set of shoulders and darkened expression staring him down from within it.

In a single flip, his visor draws in front of him again, two gripping sets of white knuckles announcing just how cacophonously his bike can rev until it glides off a million weightless miles away.

As it tends to go on, Malik isn’t home long before his cell phone vibrates.

_Guzo: 57 hopewell st Apt 5A Get there_

Sitting on the bed’s edge, the room is dark as he traces the lines in the sheet beside him.

_Malik: K_

Proportionally that’s enough to end it. Malik goes to stand toward his dresser drawers, called back by a second chime.

_Guzo: and come to me right after U owe me a few rounds worth I didn’t forget_

Joy.

_Malik: K_

He sets the phone down to the table. The piles of cash rendered to him stay the same each job, savings spending and sickening. His wallet he knows has run a bit thin since the weeks surrounding have turned him chivalrous, and the pile of debt, once he counts it, and recalls in the same note how many excursions he’d played the starring role of, comes up scant as well. The pathway begins there, starting with having to pay off the rent tab for the week the night before, sending a sum to his cellular provider, dropping down a few wrinkled bills in the hotel bar for pancakes after skipping breakfast (of which the syrup still lingers on his breath). There’d been various expenses as of recent, he knows he knows, tugging his top drawer opened. He’ll have to pluck it out of savings for now and return it once he’s finished throwing himself on top of whatever lonely housewife has beckoned him today.

A roll of dress socks pushes out of the way. Then another. It’s on his third frantic shove of clothing around that he remembers a penny in a fountain and nine hundred dollars in a Manhattan apartment mailbox.

His mouth falls tautly into itself.

The drawer pulls rattle as it shuts. Malik knows he’s nothing to worry over, not once he’s buttoning up and having hundreds tucked into his back pocket by hands that can’t help loitering.

Once he’s buttoning up, and there’s hands touching him, sure, ones that are stuck in square edged scarlet acrylics and a cigarette smoldering between two fingers. This woman’s gorgeous to anyone with taste, though Malik finds her advances crass enough to pinch the nose, watching her shake her long pounds of auburn curls behind her on an approach. One of those nails drags to the underside of Malik’s chin. She’s tall for a woman. He does not refuse her lean forward to kiss his lips. Not without a choice.

“Listen, sweetheart,” her voice coos, a high note of charm. “I’m sure you understand being a little behind on bills and all that, don’tcha?”

Malik blinks. “I…” Hands reach out in fruitless grips beside him. Her movements are all from the hips, skin bare outside the underwear she’d unceremoniously tugged on that cuts into the fleshier part of her form. Tattoos write stories down her biceps and ankles. Her name’d been Sandy or Samantha or something in that area. Malik cannot take the time to remember, not as he watches her now float across her bedroom hardwood to fish within a table drawer. When she faces him again, his eyelids pinch together to make out the shape of the bags in her hands, a pair that proffer out toward him.

“One gram of pure Colombian coke, that’d run you a hundred dollars on any street corner around here.” The second bag, the thicker one, is gestured with next. “And I dunno how much weed is in here, but that should cover the rest. That alright?”

Malik blinks.

He doesn’t think doing sixty down a residential street with cocaine in his pocket is his smartest option, yet he hasn’t the heart left to care about it.

Trees canopy the stretch of park that greets the next horizon. A land marker. Just around the bend of it, day feels to shift to night against the sullen gray paintings of buildings scraping side views. He edges his bike toward a grotto carved out betwixt two walls. Sunlight dies away, the stark black of his helmet and cotton shirt still warm from absorbing it. Keys jingle up to a pocket as he steps out onto the sidewalk, shoes pointed at the toes, the dowsing guidance to step forward into the newfound light, dim within the hotel lobby. Velvet and gold decorate the inside. The same doorman with his same uniform epaulettes nods Malik onward at his request to see room 325.

He does not knock- he’d learned that finely once before. Knocking on the door only flicks in gear the paranoia behind it. Rather, he scans the granted keycard against the knob and enters against the voice first heard deep into the hall. There’s a long table his boss likes to sit at, chair high backed in leather all Godfather style, the rapid Italian he shouts into the cellphone plastered to an ear not dulling that effect. Malik waits with a grip on an opposite elbow. If he could breathe, he would.

The phone, an obvious burner, snaps shut like an anaconda jaw. Guzo milks a final depraved sentence in the language before switching over, hand scruffing his closed eyes as he calls out, “Come in. Make it quick.”

Contrastingly, Malik’s gait is steadied. There are for certain landmines tucked away in this room, whether they be beneath his feet or before his eyes, Malik does not wish to play the chance.

Around him, the room appears tidy enough for company, though he believes himself to be anything but, not daring to glance too widely around at the fresh made bed or dusted shelves. Staying here must cost at least twice as much as his own place. Wind patters at his narrow lungs.

“What’s it, then,” the man and his gravel for vocal chords begin. A breath huffs from him. “You shoulda worked four jobs since I last saw you. ...Three fifty? Three fifty. Alright.”

In Malik’s head, his game plan tells him to grip the two hundred ten dollars from his pocket, which he does, the next step being a quick toss forth and sprint for the door- a foot laid back does garner the idea, but he’s halted, not by moral but instead by that door clicking open before he’s the chance to throw himself toward it.

A woman he’s yet to recognize steps inside, allowing hallway light to leak in just long enough to make out her droopy eyelids and kind olive skin. She worries not for interruption, as evidenced by the saunter forward to cut ahead of Malik. To the table, an odd sum of bills slaps down, and her swift breath of speaking boggles him to the core and even more so once Guzo matches the language to shout back at her. Their discussion closes as their shared boss throws a finger toward the door, the woman’s own hands tossing up into exasperation as she turns to leave.

“Time is money, darling!” Malik deciphers from his quick bellow in sarcastic English. He wonders the true stresses of managing a city sex ring. Such a poor soul.

Guzo, dark irises finished with their swivel, turns again to Malik, saying nothing through words, only the lay of an empty palm outward. His fingers curl forward in short beckons. Gusto drains straight down to the floor.

“I know it’s not everything,” Malik admits before it can be hollered out at him. The man’s gaze flicks up from counting the money handed toward him, erupting Malik into a flinch that shakes away next. “I’m sorry. Something came up.”

An ashtray sits beside his hands. Metallic clinking is the drop of them, rings to oak, watching Malik sharp and hot from the meter that splits them.

He braces himself to sprint, yet some breed of calmness draws him to stay put. “Y’know, you’re the only male product I got,” Guzo tells him lowly. “So it’s really gonna be a damn shame if I have to hurt you over a hundred and forty bucks.”

Malik does not wince away from the threat. Somewhere, he’d been prepared for this, and like a soldier he watches the glint roll through his boss’ eyes as he reaches into the open warmth of one coat pocket.

Between them, a baggie drops.

“Take that,” Malik tells him. “It’s- it’s fifty grams of marijuana.”

Were he dealing in more expertise, he’d sweat over the idea of being called out. Malik knows in reality that he could hardly call out one gram of pot, so the number’s been a wild guess, but the portion is a healthy one, one that Guzo plucks up to examine in the dark.

“I’ll take this as a gift,” he says at last, drawing Malik’s held breath out from him. “Get me my money. No jobs until I get it.”

His molars grit together in a cringe.

For all he’s lost, Malik will grip bloodied broken nails onto the last shreds of his dignity. He’s got that, and he’s got the freedom of the road ahead of him as he rides home against the oncoming dusk. That’s what he needs. Not money. Not anything.

If he could stop thinking of it, lain eyes to ceiling in his room just as soon as it can be so, then life would perhaps go on better.

Not money, not anything. All he needs is life before his eyes, which becomes just exactly what he picks up his phone for next.

_Malik: How much do you think Kaiba would pay me if I beat him in a duel._

For a long while, he’s left to clutch the screen light against his chest, checking every so often for news until it comes at last, a close twenty minutes of silence post.

_Anzu: he’d probably kill you instead of paying you_

_Anzu: why?? do you need money?_

He bites back the edge of his lip.

_Malik: No. Just making conversation_

Inhaling through the nose, he watches the three dots appear, vanish, appear again just before scanning over the next message.

_Anzu: i can help you out, don’t say no just because you feel bad about it. Be honest!_

_Malik: I’m alright._

_Malik: Let’s see each other tomorrow._

_Anzu: sure! around noon?_

A breath slips in serenity from his nose. Anzu does not turn him down. If she’s the last person on this Earth, the last flicker of hope in the expanding dark, she’ll be there every second he should need it.

That’s it.


	7. Chapter 7

He’s just fucking thrilled to turn a half hour drive into an eighteen minute cruise across good old NYC. This morning he’d woken at eleven, soaked himself in shower steam, and very specifically chosen his outfit as one he minds not ruining.

After drawing himself to the same curb as always, forever, after calling her to let his presence there be known, she takes her time meeting him. Something of ten minutes pass before he’s able to pop the kickstand back up and feel her grip wrap around him.

Just as on that quick phone call, where she’d begged their destination and been quiet after hearing he’s chosen another beach, she’s subdued to greet him and disappear behind her helmet. Perhaps, he feels, more option should have been given than his single decision, though he’d ten times out of ten prefer a day spent in the open world than crammed in a little restaurant or theater dreaming of it.

Plus, she’s too stunning in the frilly black sundress, tie behind the neck alluding to the bathing suit underneath it, to deny.

A rainbow shimmers against the reflection of sun upon sea. He thinks it only fate as to how he’s found where they’ve pulled up to- it’s not the same sand they’d walked through together. Malik, for all his scheming, can work on whim as well as any set plan.

They store their helmets beneath the seat. When he reaches to take her hand, she hesitates, perhaps close to accepting until a gust of breeze draws both hands to anchor her skirt in its place. Anzu laughs once through the bite of her bottom lip, hopping down off the ledge separating parking from free range sand. Higher now, he can watch her as if he should morph into a Phoenix of emerald irises, the gilded scepter that leans gainst her doorframe as she sleeps at night.

“You coming?” calls her turn over a shoulder. Even with the wide spread of her eyes, the way her smile can only tick a half length, Malik can picture her covering magazines, the kind that attract attention in the supermarket checkout because the story on the front’s just _too_ bizarre. _CAUGHT IN THE ACT - Up and Coming Starlet Mazaki Anzu Spills All the Details on Her Split From Cheating Boyfriend._ Something like that.

Malik jumps, all in the knees, down against the sand, pacing forward to catch up with her walk toward the shoreline.

Salt stings his skin. Shorts and no sleeves, a look for today that allows him to wade hips deep out into the ocean. For once, he can forget everything he’s already forgotten- and that’s one hot point of today at all, to not remember what it is that he’s forgetting -as the feeling of the waves attempting to swallow him fills his mind. If he let it, allowed the water to forgive every sin as it envelops his every last inch, then he’d never see his family again, and he’d never eat the om ali his sister cooks on birthdays, and he’d never feel the strength of a hand gripping his shirt back, just before he’s set to step out into the road of traffic he hadn’t seen first, and in the sea, the vast ocean, once it eats him whole, there will be no love, and there will be no worries. Malik feels the saltwater kiss his finger pads, the microscopic grooves of skin that confirm his entire identity. Without hands, no one will know him. Without eyes or mouth or nose, he’ll know no one else, save them from the pain that comes alongside his first steps against the lip of life. A memory comes to him, as he’s standing there forgetting, of being precisely nine, and the gasping shout tumbled from Ishizu’s lungs once she’d caught him taking cuticle scissors to the side of a cheek. That’s what he recalls first, whenever the moment should arise in his mind, but most of all, he can still feel the _relief_ that had rushed his body when the blade had penetrated through. Pressure, all the pressure squeezing his brain like a trembling fist, it’d drained away with an easy _pop._ He may have screamed to watch the blood loll down his knuckles, perhaps why his sister had come knocking on the bathroom at all to find him. But Rishid was good enough with a sewing needle to only leave behind a breath of a scar.

The feeling does not leave him. Even with all else he forgets, he will never not be the Malik commanded by pure black malice beating through each atrium. But he forgets.

For once, he can forget, and for once, _she’s_ behind _him._

When he looks for her, she’s a siren on a rock that lures him over with a smile. The water does not resist him walking toward the cape of boulders flattened by their years beneath higher tides. Their surface feels slick once he’s close enough to touch, to pull himself up and sit just beside her. Ocean breaks against their dipped shins.

“I’ve never been to this beach before,” Anzu murmurs. No reflection meets her stare against the water. “It’s nice. There aren’t many people here.”

Evidence to her truth sprawls around the sand, where few towels have been laid to rest upon, a pair of women beneath an umbrella, a child shrieking with joy at every touch of water against her, a dog walked on leash length toward the seafoam, _life_. Life, but for all he cares, he could be the only beating heart for miles.

Along his dominion, the lavender of his gaze catches movement. His hands are gentle enough to reach toward it, lifting the snail by its moistened shell off the rock it suctions to below the water’s surface; he offers it toward Anzu, not a gift but mere experience, to which she grimaces tightly with a hand clasping her neck’s crook. It stays there, but with her second, after time has passed of Malik sitting before her holding the little creature under her nose, she reaches up and strokes the shell with one delicate finger. “Aw… He’s kinda cute, even if he’s gross and slimy at the same time.”

Malik laughs. Back to the rock he places the snail, holds it in place until he feels it gain its footing against the rock again. Wetness flecks off his fingers. The lap of the dress she’s yet to take off gains that wet once his arm lifts higher, apologizing in a dip of the head.

Anzu moves touch to wipe away the droplets that still quiver three dimensionally, and that’s when Malik first sees it- or rather, suspects he’d seen it, and begs with any God available that it isn’t so bad as his mind jumps to believe.

He knows right when she catches him staring the way he does, staid and silent, for it is the same second she looks up at him to speak, quieted instead to peer back at him. Malik lifts one hand, where gold shines in the sunlight of his wrist, bringing it toward the drips of water cast on her throat. They drip down to the jutting angles of her clavicle. He knows right when she notices the stray powder smeared away on her fingers, for it is with frenzy that those makeup tainted fingertips come to clasp his before they can contact the bruises on her neck.

Instinct throws Malik to his feet, knee deep in the ocean water as intuition and illness wrap both arms high over his head to strip from himself the taut black fabric of his shirt.

It stays balled up in one damp hand. Without the barrier, he’s certain his breathing can be seen down to the very last seconds of exhale, chest cut handsomely in its rises and falls. Anzu blinks, so much so that the reddened glow of her face does not bother either of them in the moment, not in the moment of his finding a seat beside her again, angled more toward the sun this time as if to speak directly to Ra as His disciple.

He cannot see her face now. The feeling of her fingertips against his skin serves him twice as well, anyway, the tracing of a nail against the divots starting high upon his shoulders, intricate characters fading down against warmed flesh.

“...Does it hurt?” questions a shy voice, hardly above a whispering. Not physically. Not anymore. Malik leans forward against his legs, permission for her to continue.

It’s a massage, better than any deep tissue kneading, the feeling of Anzu’s finger exploring within his very skin. The microscopic grooves that make her human. Touching him.

Should his pulse tremble more, she’d feel that too, he’s sure, and he must wonder to himself whether or not she’d mind holding his heart in those hands of hers.

“Hey…” becomes the second thing she has to say, drawing forth to lay her chin to his shoulder. “Do you still talk to the guy that made you that fake ID?”

Against his back, he feels her lips shift, smirking, a motion he cannot help mirroring.


	8. Chapter 8

Mimi calls him the following Thursday to ask, in julienned Arabic, why he’s so late to their weekly meeting _._ He chews on that relief like bubblegum. He can always count on her and the husband that goes the gym every Thursday morning from ten to noon.

His keys fill his pocket. It’ll have to be quick.

His keys lay to the top of the dresser. It is.

By the bedside table he counts out the earnings, lays them all out in their bank-fresh flatness. Should he cancel the debt he’s made for himself, there’ll be ten dollars left for him to spend on existence. Absently go his fingers tapping along the wood tabletop.

_Malik: I have the money_

There’s always next Thursday, he’d thought to himself, but battled back that it’d just be a cycle gnawing off his flesh bit by bit until nothing remained. He could hole away a few twenties each time he gleans any for the next stretch of time, though the argument there proves him dull enough to believe Guzo should hold out that long. Malik knows him as man who abhors patience. So for what reason the message he’s sent sits alone for such a period as to darken his phone _perturbs_ him in a way he can’t describe. A finger brightens the screen again. He stares at the message.

After an hour, he checks back to find himself alone still. Another hour, and he’s an inch from excited to feel as though in some sort of clear. Perhaps the text had been seen and ignored. Debt forgiven, life reset. Once he’s finished with such a ludicrous daydream, Malik lifts to slip a folded sum of bills into a pocket, walking toward the dormant elevator bay.

The ride downtown whips his hair behind him and toned arms darker. A stop for gas tempts him into telling the tender to take the bill he hands in full, but that in itself scolds him into recalling what this trip is for to begin with, and accepts his change back after loading up ten dollar’s worth of petroleum.

Daunting shadows feast upon his park at the curb. He places his helmet in the under seat storage. A hand keeps steady to the bulge of one jean pocket. Daunting.

Revolving through the front doors, the lobby gleams of its gold and velvet. Malik swoops his gaze left to right before stepping forth, a strut, laying a hand to the front desk as to gather that bellboy’s fleeting attention.

“Oh, Mistah Ishtar,” the young man says. His hair sits neatly combed under the hat he dons. One glance around, and he’s leant forward to speak through his teeth. “If I were you, I wouldn’t come around here anymore. Guzo’s long gone. I hear the police have been sniffing him out.”

Wherever Malik’s breath has gone, his lungs would like to know.

His palm has thrown the door open before his eyes find anything but white. It isn’t running, hardly rushing either, the way he walks, tramping toward his motorcycle and sliding on sans the lift of helmet upon him. For a moment, Malik only sits there, holding the handlebars, knowing no world outside the strip of road he stares at.

Then he guns it. Hard. And that strip of road is a long one, endless as he streaks his way upon it for miles and miles through the weaving grid of streets.

The feeling of leaning his chest to the overpass railing does not compare to his existence in the open window, but it’s a close second. Even more of a thrill, one that delights his bones only for how decisive he’s forced himself to be, comes through watching the tiny tiny dimple his cell phone makes in the ocean beneath him, surface returning to perfect smoothness right after. Swallowed. He’s been swallowed, never to be traced. Thighs kissing the bike sides again, Malik decides he won’t care about it. It isn’t as if he needed it. He can remember that he’s supposed to meet Anzu at nine o’clock tonight without any digital reminder.

“I’ve always wanted to check this place out,” reminds him at nine:thirteen how breathtaking she can be. She’s got on a pink miniskirt and a shirt that’s hardly more than a brassiere as it hugs against the angular curve of her body. Glitter lines her eyes in a way that steals their natural thinness. More bracelets than he can count. She’s stunning, standing there on the sidewalk after he’s pulled up beside her, clutching in two fingers the card he’s handed her. And a smirk. “Glad I’m finally old enough.”

Twenty three year old Téa Gardner pockets her new ID, then offers an arm out to walk him toward the door of the nightclub. Nothing more than a stout black building stands ahead of them, taking a gaze up and down it as he’s led within. Instantly, the noise hits him, the stuffy techno beat he cannot pinpoint words in among all the commotion. Malik’s seen clubs like these on TV movies. A couple hundred young socialites drinking themselves sick on the dance floor, a muscled bouncer at the door that doesn’t mind if a name isn’t _on the list_ if he’s slipped enough money. That’s what Malik pictures, up until the very moment they step inside, nearly matching heights in those heels of hers, to hand forward identification cards for the man inside the door to check over for half a second before handing back. Anzu slips hers into her purse, and slips her hand into his, taking forward toward the strobe lights flashing along every wall.

He hadn’t thought for a moment how much he’d hate such a scene, because she’d wanted to come, she’d been over the moon with the idea. As a twenty year old, Malik supposes this is just exactly where he belongs, but there’s something about watching other people glug back booze whilst his mouth remains dry that makes it feel ever drier. His point proves itself when he turns around from gazing around the crowd to spot Anzu with a glass in her hand.

The paper umbrella scrapes against her cheek when she sips. Malik watches every inch of it, and he can smell it on her breath as she leans her lips against his ear to beckon, “Wanna dance?”

In another life, perhaps Michelangelo had asked him to paint by his side. A scoff settles beneath his tongue. Could he get away without swiveling a single hip tonight, he may prefer it, to sit on one of the crowded round couches and just watch her all night, bracelets jangling above her head and sweat dripping glitter between her shoulders. That’s what he’d like, though, once she’s downed her drink in one hard pull, Malik finds himself with a front row view of her every last movement, being so compact together on the dance floor of hundreds. Together, the music and lights make him dizzy. He catches himself blinking at every alternating flash of white to blue to red, head spinning sideways as she moves before him like a penny picture show. To fit in, he sways himself, waist circling about idly, but he’s mesmerized by _her,_ putting himself second to his focus placed ahead. Anzu flicks her wrist as if it lacks bone. Effortless. Her hair slides as her head does, jerking in waves to match swift shoulder jives. Her chin lifts. Malik watches her lips swerve around the lyrics he cannot hear.

By the time he realizes he’s been staring long enough to cure him, he’s sick again in the heat of hands clamping his wrists. Anzu pulls him against her like dirty ballroom dancers, hips sharing boundaries, eyes never locked until she plays along to the song and its chorus. Her hand lifts, presses to his mouth, lowers. Her hand lifts, presses to his mouth, lowers. Malik blinks, and she’s gone from the repetition four times over, bodies cold with missing touch as he watches her vanish among the growling crowd.

The heat around him isn’t the comfortable type that greets him as he wakes on the banks of Cairo. It’s suffocating. He knows where the exits are, though, and he needn’t be afraid here, not with such a tight feeling in his chest that pounds eye-watering euphoria through every vessel. But he finds difficulty in keeping those tears at bay without any other outlet- it’s just that sort of feeling of being alive, of seeing the world, yet he’s frozen in time as bodies move around him. His eyes close, breathing in the hot smell of youth and liquor through his nose. The next time he inhales, it is with his hand clasped over his mouth, the same hand that’s dipped inside his jacket pocket plastic, leaving to its top a thin line of white powder.

He sniffs.

Instantly, nausea grips him. Not worry sick but dirty sick, like he’s betrayed every last dogma he stands for, though in a moment he’s a difficult time recalling any of them. His fingers extend before him, strobes changing their color six times in the span of a blink. He squeezes them to fists, relaxes back, staring. When his hands drop, it is only for a moment, just to gather himself before he decides he has not a clue what people tend to do in his situation, and figures he may as well dance.

It doesn’t hit Malik until it hits him. There’s a vague six or seven minutes of just his hips and arms. He jumps once or twice, just... _because,_ just because it feels good to be free up in the air for that split second. It feels good when his jewelry settles back against his skin, just the same as the sensitive flesh of his chest touching to his shirt is an ecstasy he’s never known. Hands cup their opposite arm, hugging himself on a stupor of closed lids and jerking waist. When it occurs to him that he can discern the words of the next song, a grin breaks his face, surely shouting along with them. It’s like he’s on the subway again, that very first time where they’d party hopped all night before a long ride home, and he could soak in the music right into his bloodstream, physically, the sticky old record, whatever it’d been- he’d known it then, that’s his point, just like he knows this goddamn groove pounding in his ears is some Madonna song, even if he’s never heard of her before. Eyes still closed, his head bobs around in quick whips, limbs sprouting rapid on his either side, perfect timing. His vision blossoms in raspberry colors only once he feels the startle of fluid cleansing his very soul. Even if it’s just been his shoulder that’s been splashed in a stray drink, Malik can tell he’s drenched head to toe, he’s certain of it, but the only thing his mind can settle on is reaching forward to grab the first hand he sees- the one leant sideways, grasping weakly still that emptied glass that had alerted him to life at all -he grasps a hand or an arm or a beltloop and tugs forward a woman very practically right into him, melting toward him in a wobbling bend. The woman is tall and glimmering. She’s a goddess, he’s certain, bronzed skin and stark black hair down both shoulders. Or perhaps it’s blue. It- oh, it’s red, now. Green. Malik blinks. She’s ethereal.

His laughter is all head tipped back and tongue lolling. There’s a hand on his back and quite possibly a mouth on his neck, kisses that he can feel straight through the gold of his necklace.

On the next rock forward, he’s facing the wall, and he only knows so once he’s flattened his forehead against its smooth surface. In some leering, frosted method of step, he adores it against him, but he feels too manic to get back to dancing before the music dies out to stay much longer. Those beats pummel his membranes a decade per second. He’s got to get back out there before he misses it all. He’s got to.

Like Moses go his arms through the crowd. First the arms then a leg struck right out, crawling himself at half height to figure out where he wants to be.

“Malik! Malik!” sends him shooting upright. That’s where. Ah ha. After his spin around toward the call, she’s right up behind him, pulling the fabric of his bare arms along as she pleases. Malik swims through the thick of the air. Glancing at Anzu again, once they’re front to front, treats him to dinner and dancing all in itself. Her lipstick smears rose across one cheek. In the low lights, neither of them bear any scars.

She’s a hurricane along his body. Grinding winds of her hips meet his, rolling forward against him so close their heartbeats sew themselves together. Malik grasps her, without knowing why, but the fire that burns his palms at the touch makes them feel as if he’s melted right through her, colors on a palette that fade together as one. He grasps her at her waist, feels her bones right through her skin, and that’s the way it feels the whole time she’s leant up upon him with their mouths open against each other. He’s got a thigh pressed up between hers as she dances, never stops, nails shredding him down to the organelles. Her tongue is another being as it tangles with his. Anzu grinds against his body. Anzu kisses him. Malik cannot tell the motions’ difference from an unraveling of his whole form. Anzu tugs the zipper on his back and all his guts tumble out right there on the nightclub floor, and someone slips on the wet of his small intestine, and another one digs a stiletto through the center of his liver, but at least she’s kissing him.

His pockets are empty when he wakes up. There’s a stain of white powder down the side of his pants that tells him he hasn’t slept enough yet.

“-right now?! You’re kidding me. Tell me you’re kidding.”

Malik’s vision knows nothing more than the slits of it. Through them run the hunched form of Anzu, simultaneously able to hold her cell phone to her cheek, tie the fluffy fluffy pink bathrobe over her skimpy pajamas and duck down to peek through the unparted curtains all at once. He watches her teeth bleed back in a tight wince, perhaps to the sunlight or whatever else could await her, but he supposes he cares more to watch her spring straight up and glance him over in his place slung over the couch. “No, no! Of course I’m excited! I just...wasn’t expecting you. At all. Ahaha…”

Darkness shrouds him in the moments that follow a toss, and he reaches to pull the tee shirt slung at him from its place on the living room floor. He grasps it, watching her nod and _mhm_ another while. His braces dig garishly into his skin.

“Yep, I can't wait! Just give me one second, I’ll be right out. Mhm. Okay, just a sec.”

Her phone clatters to the coffee table. Malik spends half a second thinking how he’d like to own one of those before sharp words stress him to look up. “You might wanna put that on,” Anzu says of the shirt he grasps.

He shifts enough to lose the throw blanket off his back. Swollen eyelids, he can feel them in every blink, and in every breath, his nose feels of dry fire. “Where’s- Where’s...Rowan..?”

Pale white legs split the space between the bottom of the miniature length robe and the slippers that match. A hand on the front door’s knob, Anzu peers toward him and shrugs, “I don’t know. Probably on his sister’s futon.”

Processing time does not exist; that knob clicks itself, latch undone, door thrown open to plaster her in a glee he’s rarely seen be genuine.

_“Yuugiiii!”_

As though his puppeteer, her arms toss up the same second he’s bolted into sitting. From the corner of an eye, he watches a hug bend forward to be exchanged, and he’s just tugging the hem of his shirt down to stand upright (precariously, with nearly a tip backward again before he catches himself) just as Anzu clears the doorway to allow her guests enter further inside.

“This is the dump I pay three hundred fifty thousand a month for…” comments so callous a voice, Malik tenses through every nerve.

“Thirty two hundred dollars is _nothing_ for a view of Central Park,” waves Anzu’s hand first, then reaches it higher to clasp what she can of him. “Oh, c’mere, Kaiba, you know you wanna hug me.”

Malik’s sense to flee arises within him, for he’s found something to fear here and it is watching Kaiba Seto be embraced around the center, not reciprocating one inch.

Relax finds him to catch Yuugi’s pinch of laughter. Seeing him there, a yard or so away, is surreal to the Malik who last knew him as the Pharaoh he’d been made to worship his entire life. If he squints, he maps it out, the way this Yuugi who’s freshly twenty one and still dressed in pure leather and chains resembles what he knew of that deity. His face doesn’t look so round, just _slightly_ sharper in those eyes that, in a split second of widening, turn toward the mirage of Malik standing in the midst of the living room.

“Malik…” he marvels, smile stretching across his face just before a bow forward.

Malik sucks in a harsh breath. “Yuugi,” he returns, trying as much respect as he can without worsening the throb in his head. His nod bobs back straight, hesitant- though existent -to face the third next. “...Kaiba.”

“Hah,” Kaiba does not wait to bark back. His sneering draws Malik back a pace. “If it isn’t the little stowaway himself.”

“Let’s have coffee,” Anzu intervenes. That smile she serves screams in unnerve.

From behind the bathroom door, Malik learns many things. The first is that, yes, his eyes are as red and thick as they feel, the second being that Manhattan tap water stings like a motherfucker on bare eyeballs. He learns that every wall in this apartment is as thin as the bedroom’s, because the subsequent verities come from Yuugi’s willingness to fulfill her every last question. They’re visiting on behalf of the younger Kaiba, whose birthday falls one week from today and has been just dying to explore the States (and who’s doing so currently, having been distracted by a particular shop window and left under the care of a big brother-approved attendant whilst they continued here). Malik’s forehead throbs against itself. Shaking hands wrap around the sink lip, lifting high to swipe the mirror out of his sight and spelunk through the medicine cabinet behind it. The shelves appear mostly barren, a package of allergy pills, an upturned medicine cup still sticky with deep red. He squints to read the label on a prescription tube, tossing it down for the trashbin after identifying the name _Larson, Rowan_ printed across it.

The cabinet shuts, and the true door opens upon hearing the first muffled bit of, “Ah, well, we should go,” sound out. His new presence claims Yuugi’s attention for a half second. He looks back to Anzu. “I just wanted to let you know we were here. We have to go find Mokuba and Isono before we head out. We’ll probably see the Eiffel Tower today, I’m pretty excited.”

“Empire State Building,” Kaiba corrects with both eyes thrown for the ceiling. Sin quick, however, they dart toward the shadow looming in the bathroom threshold. “Malik. Don’t think the score is settled just yet. If I so much as hear one more word from your sister, I’m throwing you on the first plane to pyramid-land myself.”

“ _Ah-ya-ya-ya-ya,”_ sounds Yuugi’s strange little chatter of an attempt to hush the other, a palm tossed up flat to his own forehead. “Let’s...get going. I’ll talk to you soon, Anzu, we should go out for drinks or something. Oh-” He flinches frozen, then attempts to laugh away what he’s said. “You aren’t twenty one yet, I forgot about the weird American rules.”

Anzu leaves behind the coffee mugs on the table ahead of her rise from the couch. “Don’t worry about it. Let’s hang out though, I’ll text you!”

Malik watches their second hug, watches Anzu not push her luck and leave only a wave of goodbye for Kaiba this turn. The very second the door closes, dust brushed up toward the line of light through the curtains, Anzu turns stiffly around toward him and from her _core_ drops a sigh.

“Do you think they could tell how hungover I am?”

The pose she strikes shakes his head with humor, though the motion regrets itself. He massages his head through a palm. Tray of mugs in hand, Anzu calls to him, tells him once his eyes have opened, “There’s Tylenol in my bedroom. I heard you looking around the bathroom for it.”

Malik sniffs. His nostrils burn.

“Anzu,” perks her attention back to him, separated by the distance of her at the kitchen and he toward her room. “What was that song called last night...the one we danced to when we first got there?”

To the question, she perks her nose. “You don’t know George Michael?” The tray adjusts to bear itself against one hip whilst a freed hand mimics the same dance moves as the night prior, lip syncing what Malik makes out to be _hand to mouth, hand to mouth._ When it stops, it is with her huff at his clueless expression. “It was an 80’s themed club, didn’t you notice? Do you really think I’d wear glitter eyeliner on a normal day?”

On this normal day, flecks of it still linger on her cheeks, prominent mostly in her turn around for the kitchen, hand flagging him hopeless in equal parts their vanishing.

Malik explores her bedroom cautiously, stepping around last night’s clothing strewn along the carpet, a trail that leads him to her vanity table again. The mirror welcomes him wholly. He glances toward the tray of concealer powder left to a corner, tipping it closed with one finger, arranging a few toiletries scattered astray back in line. Closest to him, a bottle sits with its lid upside down atop it. He palms two pills from it, downs them by a sip off the water bottle left beside it. A midnight awakening, he assumes of their display, swallowing all the way to plastic crushing in his hand. Breath rattles him.

“No work today?” Anzu asks over breakfast. She’d claimed an ill stomach when he’d padded into the kitchen and found her cooking only for one. Steam evaporates out the side window opened just for it. His glass fills for the second time with water.

Malik shakes his head, then reaches up to feel the odd weight of one side. The naked left lobe matches sourly to the gold dangling off the other one. He bites his cheek.

“I think I’ll look for another job,” is the _truth,_ nothing wrong about framing it more casually than the intense _need to find a new job ASAP_ feeling that mingles in his stomach. At least he gets to keep the one forty. If he hadn’t lost his wallet in whatever the hell had gone on last night, too.

Anzu lifts her chin to him. “Oh? No more Mister Wall Street?”

Malik blinks to her, filling his mouth with English muffin. Yolk drips thick and warm down his fingers.

“Yeah. My last job...fucked me.” Such a flawless double entendre sends him laughing. Anzu takes her turn with confusion. He mends it, licking the tip of a finger clean. “I’ll be fine.”

Her thighs press closer together in her lean forward. The paper napkin is accepted gratefully. “If you’re seriously looking, I can ask some of the girls at practice. They all have rich fathers who own big fancy companies around here.”

Malik thinks of the first day he’d tumbled off the airport strip, hailed a cab to nowhere and rented a room at the first hotel he spotted, thinks of that night he’d spent sitting up in a cold foreign bed, glancing every so often at the open page of his phone shining his sister’s contact through the dark. But he hadn’t called her, not then and not the next week that he’d lived off continental breakfast whilst pretending he didn’t know _underqualified for the position_ really meant _looked too Middle Eastern._ Whichever big fancy companies those spoiled girls and their wretched fathers own, he’s seen them all, walked in and out after every secretary and custodial rejection, walked right past them to apply for a downtown bellboy position that had been searching for a young, fresh face. He hadn’t expected to catch the eye of a path crossed. He hadn’t expected America to be full of so many women so eager to cheat on their husbands.

“I’ll be fine,” says the last bite of sandwich stuffed in his mouth.

When he sees her again, it is the horrendously tangible vision of her in his mind grinding and sweating against his skin. The square foot of space he calls home has never felt so tight. Perhaps it’s a memory, though he thinks he’d know it ever existed had it become of him before. Cool blanket fabric grips taut in both hands. He’d like to think it happened. Otherwise, the heat in his pants has stemmed only from fantasy, and that just makes him feel gaudy and awkward as a teenage boy exploring his own body for the first time.

As much sex as Malik has endured the past months, he doesn’t think he’s ever truly felt the kind of pleasure that tops the radio charts and captivates boys on the cusp of their puberties. He compares the feeling of walking through the ocean water with Anzu on his arm to the type of insipid quiet that surges through him tangled through the sheets of another. Anzu smells far better than the shameful sweetness that hangs in the air after sex, too. Thus far, he’s felt more alive merely sitting in Anzu’s bedroom than having his cock sucked in anyone else’s.

Not to say he hates it all. Just hates himself for doing it, which tends to put a damper on his ability to enjoy any sort of feeling.

The money’d been the best part of it. He can’t imagine paying some stranger for their body, but then he thinks again of Anzu and _her_ body, and the way it had or had not moved against him, the way her mouth had tasted of what he never imagined liquor to be, and the bills practically fly from his wallet themselves.

Not that he wants to have sex with Anzu. Not that he wants to love her.

It marks yet another night of no rest for him. Between thoughts of her and thoughts of woe, he’s tossed and turned enough times to pull the sheet from one corner, writhed so much that the pillow beneath his head rests under an elbow.

Maybe that’s what horny feels like. Malik wouldn’t know.

He doesn’t bother to neaten the bed when he rolls himself from it. Metal clasps at his waist. It’s a nice solid belt buckle, one of his favorites. Too much of a shame to cover it up. He pulls a shirt to its end point just above his navel.

The elevator dings at the third floor. Ahead of him, a woman pushes a nursery stroller out into the hall with nary a glance for him the whole ride. By the time he’s at the lobby, he’s yawned as many times as floors he’s traveled down, but he’s ready, he’d say, to see what the world has to offer him.

Even in so deep a state as melancholy can be, Malik nips it at its first signs. Staying in bed won’t help him. Action will.

Action this morning, once he’s reached the desired lobby, halts him in his tracks. Several blinks shake through him. His body’s a loose ragdoll as he stands blocking the entry to the elevator doors behind him, only lifting himself from the path after two people attempt to shove themselves by. But they mean nothing to him. The only one who matters in this vast entry hall stands a handful of feet away, smiling up to something Malik cannot see from his angle. He squints his eyes. There’s something too familiar about that boy.

Said boy shoots a rapid glance toward him, and Malik makes believe he’s absorbed in the pamphlets stacked up behind him.

The safety of a moment passes. Malik looks toward him again, the boy and his scruffy haircut of short dark layers, eyes bold and wide that face the same way as before, until his mouth stops moving and from the corner wall emerges another to follow the short trail of the boy’s pointing finger.

Directly for Malik.

He grasps a harder hold against the brochure rack. Pulse seizing him, he refuses contact of leers with the one he knows is trained on him, approaching closer with every tremor of that swift, pounding pulse.

“So you’ve decided to stalk me,” the merciless voice of Kaiba Seto proclaims. Even his shadow feels heavy across Malik’s shoulders. His turn is slow, but it comes, twists him to face the pair that’s cornered him in place. From the closer angle, he’s sure now that the scruffy little boy _is_ for certain Kaiba Mokuba, the very same he’d last seen in innocence. Now he stands at what may as well be eye level, as Malik only has to glance briefly down to map out his sharpened features. Very, _very_ Kaiba. The patent owner of the brand folds arms over his chest.

“I’m don’t-” Malik moves to insist, but beneath the bright lights another emerges closer, the ding of the elevator his sole indicator.

“Malik? Hey!” Yuugi slides against the shined tile to pop up beside him. “You’re staying at this hotel, too? Wow, ah, what do you think the odds of _that_ are?”

Zero in a million.

“I knew I recognized you,” points a finger up toward him. Mokuba carries a weightless sort of cheer in his voice. That’s where to tell the brothers apart. “It’s been so long since I last saw you… You look different without that creepy Rod in your hand.”

“Don’t humor him, Mokuba,” snaps Kaiba, though he hardly comes across as so menacing with a Pomeranian on his arm.

“Are you busy?” that puppy yaps. “We were about to go out and see the city. Mokuba wanted to check out a game store around the corner. Wanna join us?”

“No,” Kaiba says, though the youngest demands, “Well, hey, shouldn’t I get a say in this?”, to which the elder says, again, “No.”

Malik’s pupils ping pong around the circus act taking place before him. Yuugi squeezes Kaiba’s elbow, a pouty sort of smile on his face, and that’s all it takes for Malik to be standing silently among the three of them in the game store around the corner.

“How’d you end up finding Anzu?” Beside him, Yuugi runs his gaze along the arrangement of magazines on the shelves ahead. Malik skirts his finger idly through a line of dust. Further still, over toward the wall of video game cases displayed floor to ceiling, he watches Mokuba select one to flash excitedly outward. His brother glances to it, blinking wordlessly once, and takes the game to hold as though it’s already bought, done deal. Malik focuses back to the aisle before him, to Yuugi and his soft questioning and smile even softer that never seems to vacate that pretty face of his.

“Just...fate,” is his answer, attention tightly forward to the folded pages his fingers roam mindless upon. Yuugi laughs into a nod.

“You’re probably right,” he says, then, all at once, he’s taken by a lift of brows. “Oh, wow.”

The store’s fluorescent lights cast a glare along the magazine as he picks it up. Malik eyes it vaguely, convinced he’s seeing double, particularly once Kaiba’s moved to stand just behind Yuugi in an almost identical posing to their photograph plastered over the cover.

A pointer finger underlines the caption of translated English letters, one Kaiba wets his lips to read aloud for him, “A new era of dueling unfolds.”

Again, Yuugi laughs, tighter this time, scratching through his hair as he flips to find them again a few pages in. Yuugi posing with a Duel Disk strapped to his arm. Kaiba standing among the holographic genius of a Blue Eyes Ultimate Dragon. “Jeez. This is kinda... _embarrassing_ to see out in public...”

“Ah, no way!” Mokuba strides over to insist. Just as the magazine is replaced in its spot, he snatches it back up in both hands. “It’s not embarrassing, it’s awesome! I’m buying it.”

A knuckle folds up against Yuugi’s blushing mouth. He laughs it off, murmuring as he watches the pair wander away again, “It _is_ pretty funny how the media keeps on branding us as _rivals.”_

Malik blinks. Yuugi turns wide eyes over a shoulder toward his silence, tilting his head as if awaiting some type of response that Malik does not have. Malik blinks.

Leaving the store is a bliss felt only a moment, killed by the insistence that he continue with them to lunch. It isn’t that he loathes the time beside them, but a feeling settles just beneath his ribcage to know he belongs anywhere but here. Yuugi offers offhand chatter as they walk the naked street, Mokuba bouncing it back whilst Kaiba traipses in long slow steps behind them all. An overseer. Malik can picture him perfectly, standing beside the Pharaoh’s throne prepared to step in should any scent of danger be caught. Protection has been ingrained in him all his lives.

Of all places, and he’s glad for it, Mokuba abuses his power as soon-to-be-birthday-boy to select an ice cream street vendor as their spot for lunch. He’s surprised at how little Kaiba seems to combat it, though supposes he’s tired of fighting the same two against one battle over and over again if the way Yuugi’s eyes light up at the premise of dessert serves as any indication. All over again he’s pale in wonder when he reaches for his wallet, cut off instead by the swipe of a black card and silence in blue eyes as Malik attempts to thank him. They wait in silence for their ticket number to be called back. The sun does not bake as it has most other days this summer, the beginnings of July already swinging in clouds. His shoulders adjust against their sockets. He’s polite, once Yuugi turns toward him, in turning right back, meeting his gaze that, suddenly, flicks quickly away, reading chagrin once they return.

“Those people are staring at us,” he whispers so lowly Malik struggles to catch it, spinning backward once he does to scan the surrounding area. Surely enough, he watches a soft middled woman and the lanky teen beside her flit peer after peer in their direction. Then it’s step after step in their direction, and that’s the moment Yuugi groans a noise deep in the hollow of his throat.

“Hey, sorry to bother you,” the younger one says, the boy and his full black outfit marked in rips at each jean knee. Malik glances him up and down, because in such a situation, he’s invisible and can get away with as much conspicuous ogling as he pleases. “I just- Um. Wow, you’re Yuugi Mutou. And Seto Kaiba. Wow, uh, _hi_.”

Carmine kisses Yuugi’s cheekbones the same light way it had in by the magazine rack, smiling politely as he greets the boy with a wave. Above him, Kaiba stares tautly.

“This is so funny,” says the woman, voice thick in city nativity. “I’m so surprised! He’s such a fan. You know, he and my other son went as you two for Halloween one year when they were younger. This is so funny. Would you mind taking a quick picture with us?”

“Yeah, dude,” the teenager breathes, fists exhilarated up beside him. “Ryan’s gonna be wicked jealous when he hears about this.”

Yuugi laughs a bit, nodding forward to accept, though catches the tramping of feet off against the distance behind him, two Kaibas disappearing from sight. Both starstruck onlookers almost lose their awe until Yuugi waves a hand out, proclaiming, “H...He’s shy.”

To his left, the boy slides to pose, his mother searching through her heavy leather pocket book to pull from it a cell phone, one she glances around a bit before offering toward Malik. “Ha, do you mind?”

For a half second, he’s nonplussed, then grasps it with a shaken nod to hold up afront the three of them. _Click._

“I really don’t like when stuff like that happens.” An umbrella shades them from the mild sun overhead. Mokuba’s nearly down to the cone by the time the other two catch up to them.

Kaiba dabs his mouth with a napkin corner. Malik watches the way he watches Yuugi, like a machine, like a protector, drawing his face up from its rest within his fingers. “I’ve told you before. Ignore them. You don’t deserve any less privacy just because you have a public presence.”

“I know,” sighs Yuugi through an exasperated simper. “I just can’t say no. People are so excited to see me. It’s...kind of nice, sometimes.”

Shade cascades along the rounded tabletop. Malik bites through cold vanilla, and says nothing.

By the time afternoon has parted ways, he’s done the same, melting his hazy gaze against the box that demands he insert three dollars bills for a twenty minute ride across the city. It’d been an...interesting day spent in the tresses of _friends_ since forgotten. The paper shopping bag hooked on an elbow houses, wrapped neatly in colored tissue, the small porcelain figure of a jackal lain to its stomach in blacks and gold (one he hadn’t known he’d been staring at in such an obvious measure as to go noticed, after Mokuba had been just as excited as his brother’s eyes told to roam through a bodega together whilst Yuugi offered an invitation with _him_ to the little antiques shop next to it, dreamy to say it reminded him of his grandfather’s place based on the dusty shelves they’d woven though, and had Malik not been watching the water babble through the tiny tabletop waterfall while Yuugi conversed at the checkout counter, he’d have been less surprised to have the sculpture handed to him when he’d thought Yuugi to only be purchasing the little carved out Mancala set he’d spotted and again brought up his dear grandfather; Malik had only stared so long at the jackal because he’d been trying to recall if the one Ishizu had on the kitchen table was sitting or laying, for the last thing he’d seen of it was watching Rishid sweep up its shattered remnants from the floor, and he’d asked what’d happened to it and been told not to worry, so watching the new one be placed in his hands had felt somewhat of an ache, but one he’d appreciated, even after meeting back up at the corner between the two shops and listening to Kaiba and his bagful of freshly bought licorice and cereal bars deem the dog not worth ten cents).

Malik blinks.

He cradles the bag on his lap the whole subway ride to Manhattan.

“Just this last one, there’s not a lot.” Across the room, the sky fades in oranges. She kneels in her spot, fingers delicate to fold cardboard atop the contents they’d spent the last hours folding, stuffing, packing. Malik accepts the box to stack with the others around the front door. “He’ll come by to get them later.”

There’d been a lull in conversation some time after he’d come knocking, unannounced, to find her in the midst of the job. Making believe he didn’t notice the baby smudge of mascara on either bottom lid had been an easy courtesy. And helping, too, came naturally to him, then and now as he offers her a hand to stand up, offers a tighter grip when a head rush drops her back down to sit on the couch. Malik watches her, natural, her shoulders expanding with breath until she’s up on her feet again. Anzu dips into her bedroom and back out too quickly for him to follow, and her reemergence grasps him by the throat. “Here,” the grip squeezes, though it isn’t a grip at all but the delicacy of her touch proffering forward a flat stack of bills. “For helping me.”

“What?” Malik shakes his head, expression a horizon of distaste. He could speak, only he can’t, not as she’s pouncing to press the money to his chest and brush past the issue in saying, “It’s getting pretty late. Do you want to stay over?”

If she’s tried to distract him, no, it’s not worked, he isn’t consumed by the way she’s worded it as _stay_ rather than _sleep_. Malik reminds himself not to remember the previous night spent in sweat, the same way he does upon watching her tiny July pajama shorts as she bends down for a better view at the jackal statue on the coffee table. Just to read the white print across the back of them, nothing more, surely, recognizing after a solid minute or so the four letters that spell out _LOVE._

“It was a gift,” he tells her, shaking himself into reality enough to place the money next to a lamp on the side table. “From Yuugi.”

“Oh huh?” Her casual wonder delights him. Arms reach high above her head in a stretch of the spine just before glancing around for him again, straightened. “That’s Yuugi for you. Way too selfless.”

Brows pinch forward, but she’s already prancing along, bedroom her mistress beyond the window stars.

In that bedroom, the very same, Malik finds himself imagining her and her short brunette bob brushed freely out, her legs pale and hairless stretched between the space that sunders them. She rests half sitting half leaning to the wall without a headboard to block it, pillows arranged fluffy, warm around her arms. There’s a little stuffed cat propped up among them, too, and Malik can see it from where he’s perched on the bed’s end. “...Katsu-nya,” Anzu hesitated to call it once he’d asked. The toy’s fur smooths beneath stroking hands, endless gaze. Honda won it from an arcade, but it’d been Jounouchi’s coin in the claw machine, which earns him the right of namesake, he’d insisted. “Going away present,” she snorts, replacing the cat to its spot beside her. Malik lays there, leans on her bed, and decides he hasn’t imagined anything at all, he really _is_ this lucky.

Triple sevens roll again when the skyline paints itself black. Minutes have carried casualty with them, enough to lean more so back, and more so back, until he’s curled up on his side as if he’s her faithful guard dog resting at the end of the bed, watching her eyelids gradually flutter shut. She still talks to him once they do, talks another half hour away with him, doesn’t flinch away when his fingers brush against an ankle (which he’d only touched because fatigue is flippant enough to relinquish all boundaries, and he’d noticed a faint pen point birthmark just beside the bone, so he’d touched it, just to touch). Nothing alerts him to _know_ she’s fallen asleep, only that the last two things he’s said have been met with only hums of half understanding, eyes closed and chest rising falling evenly within its loose top. Her necklace hangs down into the crevice of neck and shoulder. Standing now, Malik stays at her side. He does not touch her, returned to sound mind, even as far as he wishes to join them as one being, sharing everything down to the erythrocytes. Perhaps he reaches out in dreaming of it, for the moonlight falls across them both and within his pondering eyes once a hand reaches right back, claiming his wrist as her own.

“Can stay in here,” Anzu mumbles. She’s awake, the whites of her eyes tell him that, but she’s asleep as rumored by how quickly again they close and she’s rolling herself underneath the covers. He maps the wrinkles in the back of her shirt. He swallows.

That night, he has sex with Anzu. The first shy movement comes as his crawl against the mattress, cautious to pause every other moment while he ensures she hasn’t been disturbed. Mechanic shifts draw him down to his side, facing inward the same as she, slow slow slow until he’s lying there beside her, free of the frettings she pretends don’t exist that tighten her face in the daytime. He’s had a particular fondness for her nose, perhaps the fixation second only to the legs, and up close like this he’s able to see it flare in soft respiration while she sleeps there in a patch of moon as though a fairy stopped to rest in his garden dew. That’s how it begins, watching the little point of her nose and thinking of his own sharp angles, making love to her through his eyes for what feels like hours on end. When he touches her, he’s gentle, positive as to her unbothered breathing even once she’s pulled to his chest to stay in the cavern of his arms. Like she belongs there. Smothered there in the smell of her, that’s the climax he feels wrack through him socks to spinal cord.

And when he wakes, the plan has already set to his tongue. It’ll be best to leave quickly, quietly, before she notices what’s become of her. The only hindrance is that when he wakes, he’s already alone.

Beside him, the sheets are not warm. In his arms lays a stuffed cat.

A sweep throughout the apartment comes up empty handed, rubbing his eyes through the subsequent thinking as to her class schedule. By now it’s got to be Monday or Wednesday or something like that. Though he does not learn the day, his suspicions come to halt once he’s standing in the living room, breathing in the emptiness of the house, and a glance toward the coffee table captivates. Jackal paws weigh down on the same stack of money from the night before. A note stuck ahead of it tells him she’s gone to dance practice til noon.

Malik stretches. He doesn’t know what he’s meant to feel being alone here. It doesn’t make it bigger. It doesn’t echo more. There’s nothing so lonely about it, not being so how accustomed to loneliness he’s become. Hands smooth neatly the top of the blanket as he folds it over back into place. Maybe, in another life, she’d been the Pharaoh, and he the loyal Priest addicted to making her bed and filing her fingernails. Or he’d been the mutt that pricks his ears up at the first sound of the front door opening, just knowing she’s home again enough to whip his tail into action- that’s just what he feels as it occurs then, wondering how late he’s slept in to miss nearly her entire absence. Malik draws his gaze away from the trinkets on her nightstand to instead work his way toward the bedroom door, and the peek around it is what ruins his trachea into such a hard swallow of glass. Because he hadn’t recalled Anzu ever being so wide at the shoulders or dirty blond at the hair.

He hasn’t been seen, _a million_ licks of fortune there for the man to have only just entered the front and still be tasked by shuffling the door shut. Malik catches his foot tap against one of the cardboard boxes beside it, the last sight before he rolls himself backward across the walls, not yet panicking, no, but a ragged breath does release once he’s snuck his skinny self into the closet and pulled its slatted wood door back closed.

He knows where the exits are, and he knows he does not need to fear Rory’s presence if he himself has not been caught. Neither should he cower from the situation, as he’s not defenseless, not helpless, though cannot help thinking he’d love more than all to feel the comfort of phone call backup in any of his pockets. He shakes his head- then regrets it, immediately, as his earrings tinker their soft metal chimes. His hands clamp to still them. Clothes hang in suffocating masses around him. It’s a _tiny_ space, the one he fills now, reminding him nothing and everything of the asphyxiation tight within the walls of a plastered underground life.

_Breathe_ must be repeated in his mind roughly a trillion times before the first sight of movement catches his eye through the slats. He’s smart enough to keep himself perfectly frozen as he watches Rory trail around the bedroom, tipping through the bottles along the vanity, uprooting the blankets just laid down. A search for something, or, quite possibly, a search for nothing, a fruitless hope for anything at all to spark debate. Malik’s ribs ache against his blundering chest. The other man retreats, perking Malik’s ears through the thin back wall. Boxes shuffle. Boots stomp into the hallway. Had he heard the door swing shut, he’d wander out, but knows better of it as he listens to the intervals of silence between each echoing trip up and down the staircase.

On the final, he expects no more strife. And how dim of him it is- the door does shut, but still he swallows the sounds of intrusion. Clear as day he listens through the wall to the shifting of porcelain gainst wood, followed in quiet, followed in a snorting laugh.

“Back at noon,” Rory’s voice mutters from the living room. “She really expects me to wait up for her...”

Every muscle tenses past tension. Malik blinks several seconds, squeezes them closed to better listen as the onslaught of minutes continue on. Something sounds suspiciously of a bottle cap hitting a tabletop. Something sounds just exactly like the television blaring to life.

A hand muffles the growl that threatens.

Air blows hard from his cheeks, bearing his teeth in a frenetic bobbing of his head through the thin darkness around. He’s practically balanced in there among the clutter. Any one movement he fears will send a pile tumbling atop him. He breathes in hot frantic strokes, clasping his hands so tightly his nailbeds groan. Malik feels his mouth tauten. Beside his shoulder, brushing it every so often, a long plastic organizer hangs from the wall, each of its pockets stuffed in things that belong anywhere but. He tries to focus on counting the hair ties in one, anything to cool his pulse as he stands in the pressure of that sliver of space, noises eating up patience behind the back wall. Thirteen hair ties. One. Two. Three. Four.

In the pocket just beneath it, he doesn’t mean to look at the panties hanging haphazardly over the edge, but at least its _something._ It’s something besides thinking that he’ll be stuck here forever. His finger flicks up to push the garment back into place. It’s something, just as the clump of cash revealed underneath it, is something.

Malik doesn’t wish to pry. He doesn’t. But counting helps, yes that’s it, and that’s the only reason he chooses to find it is seven hundred fifteen dollars stashed away in there beneath dirty panties. Anzu surely is a scholar.

In the back of his mind, he wonders what she’d spent the missing two hundred or so on. In the front, he’s just thankful he’d picked the right mailbox.

The television mumbles out a nasty joke he cannot decipher, though the one who’s guffawing rains out after certainly has, and Malik knows how a choker has earned its name after eleven minutes in the closet that may as well be lifetimes. Mouth open, he swallows against the back of his tongue, rapidly eyeing what he can through the door’s wood ridges. Bits of light creep in to keep him sane. Still, after time that’s lost its own tracks, it isn’t enough, nothing to quell the fire pricking up every hair on his arm.

Beside him, the panties shift themselves to appear untouched. He figures whatever the jackal guards beneath its paws can replace the bills in his pocket now. There’s no time to feel it. He must move.

The closet door _eases_ open. Squinting in the fresh light, cold instantly soothes the stale air that had been flushing his face the last while. When he checks around the bend, the television hums with some raunchy cartoon, mesmerizing its audience enough for Malik to slip himself out into the open bedroom. For once, his eyes burn with relief, though so quickly does it die as he stumbles his way across the room. It’s funny to him how easily he’s been fooled into thinking himself the intruder. But it matters not. What presses him, like a palm to the back’s small, is fumbling quietly with the window screen and how little he knows of fixing it once he’s balancing on weak knees upon the fire escape outside. Sunlight grooms his tired hair. If he’s been noticed, he doesn’t notice. Nothing exists there, from the moment he first places a foot to the rickety metal to the split second he’s glancing down from it. Anzu’s lucky- it’s truly an incredible view of Central Park.

For all he sparks with the static of trepidation, Malik, in that one moment with the New York City wind whipping his hair and burning his skin, gazing out upon the naked Earth from two stories up, precarious, dauntless, sees the world as he’s always yearned. One step creaks the platform below him. Another rattles it.

This is it, he decides. This is where he finds the answer to all those questions his mind conjures as he suspends himself from the window sills.

He grasps in fever the metal lip of the platform under him, and jumps.


	9. Chapter 9

It’s a grid system. No matter what, he’ll find his way home.

Even with the detours, ones that expand across a decent portion of his afternoon, he finds his way home just off the subway station that’d eaten his last three dollars, working up the stairs to exit into the slate city air in short huffing breaths, a drag of his body’s tired ache. Several strangers ogle him on their paces past. Hotel windows reflect the sun in his eyes. Perhaps he could weep.

“Malik! Hey!” drags those tears sooner to break, because she’s _here_ , as real as the stains of grass on his shins, here to step toward him from a lean beside the checkin counter of the front lobby. “I figured you’d be back here sooner or later,” Anzu says. She’s smiling at him. His throat catches anew. “I got a call from Yuugi just when I was getting ready to leave practice, so we hung around for a bit. It’s so funny that you guys are staying at the same hotel.” A hair tucks behind her ear as she draws back to him, “I didn’t mean to leave you alone at my place so long. I texted you, did you get it?”

Close to breathless, Malik can only lift his hand high enough to catch light against screen. “New phone.”

The angelic shape to her face tilts against it, as if she’s readied to say something, but focus finds harshly the way he limps a leg forward in one step, the shallow heat of his coming exhales. “...Are you alright?”

“Oh, Mr. Ishtar.” Something of a cue from God, a tiny woman, hair blonde and short to the roots, clicks over in her pointy high heels and pencil skirt. Her nametag means nothing to him, as he’s only ever recalled seeing her face in quick passes through to the elevator. An envelope presses from her hand to his. “Your card was declined. The bill for the week is in there, just bring it down to the front desk whenever you’re ready.”

The woman ducks herself back toward the desk across the way. In his fingertips, the envelope crimps. Anzu sears a hole through his burning heart.

The bedding is the first thing to go.

He has no hands but claws that shred forward, gripping anything they can just to tear it from its bearings. Pillows whip themselves to the floor. Together in clumps come blanket and sheet, pulled from the mattress like hard oak roots just to fly across the carpet and hit a wall.

He has no hands nor body nor mouth in the moments he whips himself around the hotel room, pounding two aching fists over and over and over and over into the bed as a fit of emotion pulls hard up his throat. He tugs a bureau drawer straight from its hinges. Clothing tosses out behind him, falling to the open top of the only bag he’d brought with him, its zipper fighting the contents accumulated since its original standing. He presses a foot to it, screams having died out now to mere snarls that spin smoke from his lips. A chair upturns onto its back as he moves past it toward the window sill, where rather than lay himself, he simply reaches forward, tearing the curtains shut to block out the light that pours against the violence of his existence.

The door slams shut. He’s quiet in the elevator ride, breathing short huffs that make the stranger next to him shift a step closer to the opposite wall.

“Hi. I’d like to check out, please.”

Behind the front desk, the woman and her short blonde cut blink lashes at him, wordless.

Balancing his whole life packed into a duffel back on his back hardly worries him on the half hour drive. Wind blinds him. Orange lights send him on his hushing way.

He doesn’t expect the doorknob to reject his turning. For good measure, at least, he knocks just above it, listens to the silence that answers back all the way to a drop on the floor. His bag falls beside him. Back to the wall he leans, just outside the apartment’s front entrance. One knee lifts in time to a hand, flat against one half of his face where eyes sit closed and mouth hung open, such pressure in the exhale he hadn’t known it to be his own. And he waits.

“Malik..?”

When the palm moves away, it’s blurry, smudged in eyeliner, clueless. He blinks until she appears before him, the second time today, leaning a paper grocery bag against one hip while keys dangle in her second hand.

Anzu stares at him the same way children stare before they’re wise enough to understand the man in the store can’t help the jarring patches of burn of his face, that gruesome curiosity that means no harm it doesn’t yet know. He sniffs. He wets his lips.

Above, she tuts at his dishevelment, “Good thing I just went shopping,” as a tall bottle of Gray Goose slides out from the paper bag by its neck.

He’s watching how it crackles against a handful of ice cubes when she next speaks again.

“You know, I was actually wondering if you’d be interested in a roommate.” The bottle clunks back to the floor. They’re in her bed again but they’ve never been in her bed like this, where he rests head against the wall with her perched toward the end. He’d half expected to enter to another presence set up in the living room, but the apartment is dark and twice as empty when she undoes the latch, breathing the remnants of lingering smoke. The bedroom’s their own. Despite his refusal, a second glass sits filled on the floor, sweating with wait. She sips from hers, lip gloss staining the kitchen glass’ rim. “It’s perfect. There’s room now that Rory’s gone. We can both get off our asses and find work around here, maybe make something of ourselves, who knows.”

To seperate them, her cell phone sits, crooning out a playlist if only to distract the stress in the air from settling. Malik closes his eyes in a lean further against the wall. A hand moves to clutch the agony of his ribs.

“I think…” whistles his breath, “that you’re more of a...something...than I am.”

“Huh?” Her smile betrays the weight of their words. Anzu sits with one leg hanging to the floor, the other bent up against itself, flexing a reach down to set her drink on the floor beside the other one untouched. “I mean, sure, I’m something. An idiot is something.”

“Anzu,” springs his lids to part. He cranes his neck to look at her.

She bites the flat edge of her bottom lip. “I mean… I’m twenty years old already, and I’ve got nothing to show for it. It just feels like everyone around me knows what they’re doing with their lives- Jesus Christ, Yuugi’s already getting _married_ soon, Honda’s working a union job and Jounouchi...Jounouchi at least pays his own rent.”

“You’re a dancer,” Malik reminds her, to which she pulls a gagging sound mid-sip, setting the cup down again and saying, “I dance. That doesn’t make me a dancer.” Arms to the sides, Anzu huffs, “Come on, just let me pity myself for a minute without you cheering me up.”

Malik holds himself still. Ahead of him, the current song fades out to bring forth the next, quietly somber through her phone’s little speakers. The curtains sing along.

“Sometimes I wonder what the world will be like when I die,” he says slowly.

Her eyes do the scolding before the chide of voice. “Don’t talk like that, Malik.”

“No, not...not like that.” Simultaneously, they understand the weight of _that,_ and she’s quiet to let him carry on. Hands splay before him. He watches their stillness. “I think of my sister, and my brother, and how they would feel. It isn’t because I want to die, but because I feel the most alive when I remember that I can.”

Her weight shifts on the bed, perhaps to absorb him better, he likes to think. He drops his hands to his lap again, and she’s there behind them. Waiting.

“I suppose what I mean to say is,” murmurs his subtle voice, mouth tight and low, “no part of life is wasted, so long as you’re really living it.”

When the next song ends, it’s quiet. No loop around, no next song, no harmony. No breath from her. He looks to her, past their legs and longing, glazed in her every movement up to the first prick of a tear down her cheek.

“I don’t even know myself anymore,” she whispers, palms flat to her lap and gaze flat to the wall. She does not bother to clean the steady roll of droplets off her lashes. “I don’t recognize myself when I look in the mirror. I...I don’t get to be _me_ anymore, ever since I came here. I have to be someone else every single day.”

Malik does not speak. Anzu holds a hand to her throat’s base, siphoning inhales out of their staggered array.

“I was never- never a competitive person before I moved here,” she swallows, nodding left to right. “But now I have to be the best. I came from nothing, and threw myself right into that stupid pretentious college, and-and all the other dancers are just as good as me. I have to be the best, and the skinniest, and the most talented. I have to prove I can do this on my own.”

“I’m afraid of the dark,” Malik spits, bolting himself to sit straight. “I jumped off the fire escape today. I- I worked for an escort service. Oh. And I did coke at the club that night.”

Sniffing, Anzu’s able to look toward him again, a wild look in her eyes that vanishes with their further dripping. But she’s laughing- _laughing_ as she sits on the end of her own bed and cries into both hands.

“Oh my God, I’d give anything to just _go home,”_ coughs from behind them, the ragged broken syllables of a soul that’s at last relented itself. “That stupid fountain didn’t listen to me.”

Ice melts against vodka, carpet stained in condensation rings. There is no music, no melodies or harmonies to cushion the layer of life that blocks away hurt. The blanket tightens in his fist. Across the world somewhere, there’s sunlight to mirror their enclosing night, a world he’s seen in every teardrop wiped from the flush of her face. He knows he’s never done anything so callous in the right mind, but whatever compels him to lift himself, a God high upon knees that bleed not of mercy, to crawl to her, to take her chin on one hand and turn two mouths upon each other just long enough to feel her pulse within them.

It does not last, as he knows it won’t, the way he feels at that very first second of meeting lips. The thrill of the first motorcycle ride. Sleeping fitlessly against the blinking city lights. Nothing lasts.

They part slowly, her pull the initial force, to find a leg has nudged outward enough to knock two glasses of liquor on their side, draining deep within the fibers of a rented carpet. Together, they watch it go.

Hands still pounding in life against her skin, Malik looks to her again, righted, and says, “Let’s have dinner.”

Exhaustion billows from Anzu’s single, exhilarated laugh.


	10. Chapter 10

Nothing changes when he wakes up clutching her the next morning, or the next when he wakes being clutched, bothered none by her fingers crept against the deepest grooves of his back, perhaps the spots where the dagger’d slipped. He does not behave as if he owns place in that bed or that house at all, watching as the dawn breaks and the carpet stinks of days old liquor seeped within it. They haven’t known each other but a few years. That’s hardly reason to act so close.

When she laughs at a sitcom one liner, and he says he doesn’t get the joke, she’ll pause it to explain why the man on the screen thought he and another character were on a break from their relationship, so that’s why it’s funny, see, and Malik will go _Huh_ in a way that suggests he understands now, yet has no more to offer. He just likes to watch her knees click together when she laughs, or the little snort that’ll sometimes find its way out if it’s _really_ a good one.

When the delivery driver knocks at the door, he answers it for her, hands the tip off and carries the box to the coffee table and everything, all for her, and the single slice of pizza he watches her eat over an hour or so period is vicarious nourishment, so he doesn’t really need to have four others, but he does, because they’re walking uphill in this life of theirs. So what.

He doesn’t kiss her, and she doesn’t ask him to. She leaves the shower the next night with merely a towel to cover herself, droplets banging against the tile as she shoots like a firecracker off behind the slam of the bedroom door. Emerging next, she’s done to the dozens, hair pinned up in two damp buns, tee shirt advertising some local auto body shop across the chest. Malik knows that when she asks him what he’s staring at, that he isn’t supposed to comment on what a nice shower singer she is, but it makes her snicker and belt out in perfect disgrace, _“Mamaaa, just killed a maaan,”_ which makes him think he’s done something right for a change.

Anzu only puts her feet on the coffee table if her polish is drying, Malik has concluded, just after the afternoon has hit and sunlight warms the jackal’s back beside ten half wet nails of a deep cerulean. She’s quiet at his side, knees bent up and phone beneath her nose. She doesn’t do that very often, either, falling absorbed in the allure of technology, but he doesn’t mind it, not when they can exist so warmly in that brewed silence. If Anzu does not speak, he doesn’t care to, either, and while he’s a sucker for attention dolloped atop him, Malik likes to wonder what life would be like had he no words at all. Then he thinks, too, about the times he’d be babbling on and on about the things he’d seen out in that very first gasp of outside air, any latent footstep enough of a cue for Ishizu to stop her cooking or sewing or whatever else and bet to him there that he couldn’t beat her in a round of the quiet game. And she was always right. Always.

“Oh,” Anzu says, the light of her screen casting away from her face for the first time in the past quiet while. Her gaze blinks toward him. “Yuugi just texted me. Wanna go watch some fireworks?”

July the fourth is not a celebration Malik’s familiar with, not from new worldly experience nor knowledge from television programs. Summarized, by way of Anzu’s mouth as she dolls herself before the vanity mirror, Americans are narcissists, who so happen to also like watching things explode. Sometimes there’s hot dogs. Malik blinks.

But none of it matters, only thoughts befalling him now being the cut of atmosphere against their roaming bodies. Anzu clings to his waist as they speed through the growing dark. She’d told him an address he didn’t know how to find, but nodded at anyway, and lost himself behind the helmet visor. Eventually, he’s certain they’re on at least the right avenue, his so wild guess at the concert size crowd to the left of a grass field drawing them to park at a curb, step off to throw themselves within it.

“Anzu!” he hears, surprised, almost, that it hasn’t been from himself. To his left, he spots Yuugi’s waving hand just ahead of a shadow looming over his head, and to his right, Anzu pokes her nose around looking for just exactly that. A hand grasps her wrist. He points over to them, though he’s more than certain she’s looked right past it to spy the others herself. Across her face breaks a beam. Malik exists.

“Someone from the hotel said this was the best place in all of New York to see fireworks,” chirps the youngest Kaiba, who’s idea this has undoubtedly been, as soon as they’ve found their way toward him. Beside him looms Kaiba Seto himself, stark white slacks prohibiting a seat down on the grass as most everyone else, but Malik’s just impressed that someone can stand the July heat in a turtleneck.

Tree roots weave between their places on the ground. Malik crosses his legs and Anzu folds hers up, attached at the other hip to Yuugi and the conversation they share that Malik does not bother to comprehend; half the time, they talk over one another, the rest of it spent laughing too loudly or dodging hands shot out in jest. At a point, after he’s watched her reach out and pinch his nearest cheek to tease something stupid he’s said, a retaliation poke to her side works well enough to send her flying toward Malik, hands upon his shoulders, laughing against his chest when her head hangs that way. And Malik, for all the loop he is not in, does not hesitate to let himself laugh, too.

The lack of retraction perhaps is what’s done it. Her head fits as the key in the lock hole of his shoulder. “I wonder when they’re gonna start,” she yawns into her palm, as the sky has grown blackened now and his heart the slightest measure tighter.

As if in reply, just to her, a hail of shrieking steam pierces up against the horizon, streaking fluorescent scarlet upon its quaking _BOOM._ Malik jumps a bit, like he hasn’t expected it, but she can only grin, lifting herself back up to holler a cheer with all the rest of the crowd around them. His eyes close, opening next to a clap of green overhead. Such a vast sky, it works a wonder through him if anyone else can see it, across the world or beyond, such a mesmerizing sight as to steal away all breath.

Watching the next burst of blue reflect in eyes the same shade, the smile beneath it glossed in pink and daydreams, Malik decides it’s sight all his own. A feeling just for him.

That’s it.


End file.
